Ralph McInerny - Dante and The Blessed Virgin (2010, University of Notre Dame Press) PDF

Dante
Dante Dante and the
McInerny
. . . Continued from front flap
and the Blessed Virgin Blessed Virgin

“Keen as our aesthetic enjoyment of the Comme-
dia may be,” McInerny explains in the epilogue, Ralph McInerny Ralph McInerny
“intriguing as are the intellectual elements of the
narrative, we know that Dante was after a deeper “Dante was a literary genius with a profound understand- “The theme of this little book, Dante and the
response than those. He wanted to move us from ing of St. Thomas Aquinas and the philosophia perennis that Blessed Virgin, provides a Catholic reader with a
the misery of sin to eternal happiness. And he structured and permeated the Divina Commedia. Who better unique opportunity to respond to this central
shows us the inescapable centrality of the Blessed to help us get beyond the (brilliant) surface to the depths of element of the great poet’s work in a way that
Dante than the most literarily genial of Thomas’ twentieth- goes far beyond scholarly or aesthetic appreci-
Dante and the Blessed Virgin

Virgin Mary in that conversion.” This engagingly
(and twenty-first-) century disciples, the indefatigable Ralph ation. . . . The Catholic can see Dante’s devotion
written book will serve as a welcome guide for
McInerny? Dante needed guides, from Vergil to Beatrice, to
anyone approaching Dante’s work for the first to the Blessed Virgin in warm continuity with his
reach the summit of Paradiso. Fortunately, we have Ralph
time, as well as all those who value the work of own beliefs and practices. Central as Mary is to
McInerny to accompany us on the same journey.”
Ralph McInerny. the Divine Comedy, she has become even more
—Fr. Joseph Fessio, S.J.,
Founder and Editor, Ignatius Press central in Catholic belief in the centuries since it
RALPH MCINERNY is professor of philosophy was written.” —from the Prologue
and the Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval “Weaving together poetry, philosophy, and theology, Ralph
Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is McInerny shows that ‘the Blessed Virgin Mary is the key to Dante and the Blessed Virgin is distinguished phi-
author and editor of numerous books, including
his autobiography, I Alone Have Escaped to Tell
Dante.’ Starting with the Vita Nuova and the beginning of the
Divine Comedy, this becomes ever more explicit throughout and the losopher Ralph McInerny’s eloquent reading of
one of Western literature’s most famous works
You (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), and the great poem, till the magnificent closing cantos of the Par- by a Christian writer. The book provides Catho-
Blessed
the first two volumes of The Writings of Charles adiso. The book is beautifully written, making sense of every lic readers, especially those new to Dante’s Divine
De Koninck (University of Notre Dame Press, step, however complex at times, of the great journey to the Comedy, with a concise companion volume.
gate of heaven described by Dante in the Commedia, drawing
2008, 2009).
on Scripture, on Aquinas, on philosophers like Aristotle, on a
McInerny draws from a diverse group of writers
medley of modern and contemporary writers, with immense
throughout this book, including Plato, Aristotle,
Virgin
learning. Dominant themes that concern everyone, such as
St. Bernard, St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas Aquinas,
love or happiness, are treated with freshness and clarity so
the reader is made to feel that he or she is discovering them and George Santayana. It is St. Thomas, however,
anew. The total effect is joy induced by the incredible wealth to whom McInerny most often turns, and this
of content of this little book and by the light it sheds on so book also provides an accessible introduction
many vital issues.” to Thomistic moral philosophy, focusing on the
—Thomas De Koninck, Laval University appetites, the ordering of goods, the distinction
between the natural and the supernatural orders,
the classification of capital vices and virtues, and
Jacket art: Dante Alighieri and a Statue of the Virgin the nature of the theological virtues.
Mary. Images courtesy of clipart.com © [2009] Jupiter- University of Notre Dame Press
images Corporation. Notre Dame, IN 46556
Jacket design: Margaret Gloster undpress.nd.edu Continued on back flap . . .
Ralph McInerny
McInerny.indd 1 11/17/09 1:51:51 PM
Da n t e and the Bl e s se d V i rgi n
Da n t e
and the
Blessed Virgin
R alph McIner ny
University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2010 by University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McInerny, Ralph M.
Dante and the Blessed Virgin / Ralph McInerny.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-268-03517-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-268-03517-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Dante Alighieri,
1265–1321—Characters—Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint. 3. Mary, Blessed Virgin,
Saint—In literature. I. Title.
PQ4419.M2M35 2010
851'.1—dc22
2009041749
This book is printed on recycled paper.

For
Cathy, Mary, Anne, Nancy, Beth, Amy,

Terrill, Ellen, Clare, Lucy, Rita,
and Vivian
Sed certe ad hoc opus nimiam omnino fateor esse meam
insufficientiam, propter nimiam materiam
incomprehensibilitatem, propter nimiam scientiae meae
tenuitatem, propter nimiam linguae meae indignitatem, et propter
nimiam personae laudandae laudem et laudabilitatem.
Certainly I must confess my utter insufficiency to write this

book—because of the matter, difficult of comprehension;
because of the thinness of my knowledge; because of the
unworthiness of my syle; and because of the profound praise
due the person to be honored.
—Speculum Beatae Mariae Virginis, prologus

C O NTENTS
Prologue ix
Note on Translations, Editions, and Abbreviations xv
One
A New Life Begins 1
T WO
In the Midst of My Days 13
three
The Seven Storey Mountain 35
f ou r
Queen of Heaven 101
Epilogue 143
Notes 145
Index 155
Prologue
One of the marvels of art is that our appreciation of it does not re-
quire that we share the outlook of the artist. There must, of course,
be sympathy, and more than sympathy, with the protagonist and with
his manner of viewing his plight. A reader in the third millennium
can be drawn into a Greek tragedy and experience the anguish of a
character whose culture is utterly alien to his own. Explanations of
this have been advanced. It requires a willing suspension of disbelief,
a dismissal of the differences, and then immersion in a plot involv-
ing decisions almost wholly foreign in their weight and gravitas to
those that engage the latter-day reader. Almost wholly foreign. What
counterpart in our times could there be, pace Freud, to the dilemma
of Oedipus? Nonetheless, it may well be said that beneath the unde-
niable strangeness is the note of familiarity, a familiarity due to our
common humanity. The great imaginative works bring about in us
a sense of affinity with agents living in cultural circumstances long
since gone.
But we need not appeal only to the chronologically distant. When
we read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the mesmerizing voice of the
narrator establishes a rapport with such a one as Kurtz, a Kurtz who,
alive or dead, we could never be. Moreover, we grasp the contrast be-
tween a Europe that no longer exists and a colonial Africa that is no
more. It seems not to matter at all that those referents no longer exist.
ix
x Prologue
Call our empathy aesthetic, in the best sense of the term. For the du-
ration of the story, we sense and feel that the protagonist is ourselves
and we are him. We reach across the differences and in some way we
are one with Kurtz, notre semblable, notre frère.
I think, too, of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” One who does
not share the poet’s interpretation of the way in which Christianity is
the putative casualty of nineteenth-century philology and science can
nonetheless occupy the outlook of the poem and be stirred.
The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
One can argue with Arnold’s prose work on these matters, but the
argument of the poem requires only our responding to the feelings
that would accompany holding Arnold’s melancholy views, and we
experience a similar frisson.
Great imaginative works enable us to sense a common humanity
with those with whom we have almost nothing else in common. But
it would not do to suggest that there is just some residue of com-
mon nature that remains when all the differences have been thought
away. Appreciation of the story requires that, for a time, we take on
an outlook and occupy circumstances that have little to do with our
own lives.
All this is fanfare for the way we read Dante. I have sometimes
been struck, at meetings of medievalists, by the way in which the be-
liefs of those long ago days are discussed with perceptiveness and
intelligence, but also with the unstated sense that we are dealing with
matters no longer believed, indeed, incredible. Aesthetically, from
the vantage point of the scholar, surpassed attitudes can be reoccu-
pied and things said of pith and moment. Once, however, I listened
to a somewhat facetious talk having to do with medieval Eucharistic
Prologue xi
treatises, and it occurred to me to remark that there were those of us

in the audience who shared the beliefs of the authors of those trea-
tises. This was not criticism, nor was it an irrelevant remark. I have
come to think that there can be an advantage—it is a possibility only,
nothing inevitable—in sharing the deepest beliefs of an author whose
assumptions must otherwise be taken on only in an aesthetic and
scholarly way.
Dantisti, as a group, seem to me to be a very special breed of
scholar. Those whom I have come most to admire, whatever their
personal attitude toward the Catholic faith that animates all the work
of the great Florentine, seem to possess an uncanny ability to enter
into Dante’s world in a way that strains against a merely aesthetic
identification. Chaucer makes fewer demands in this regard, I think,
and of course Shakespeare is notoriously ambiguous as to his own
beliefs. But there is no such doubt possible in the case of Dante. He is
inescapably and thoroughly Catholic. A Catholic who reads him, one
who shares the same faith, can be in a privileged position.
It would be absurd, of course, to suggest that believing as Dante
does enables one, just for that reason, to better appreciate him. It
would be absurd to suggest that all the Dantisti who do not share the
great Florentine’s faith are thereby consigned to some outer darkness.
And some scholars, such as Etienne Gilson and Ernest Fortin, have
argued from a Catholic perspective for the heterodoxy of Dante’s
Catholicism. For all that, the theme of this little book, Dante and the
Blessed Virgin, provides a Catholic reader with a unique opportu-
nity to respond to this central element of the great poet’s work in
a way that goes far beyond scholarly or aesthetic appreciation. It is
somewhat like the different ways in which a believing or nonbeliev-
ing reader responds to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “The Blessed
Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe,” which ends:
Be thou then, O thou dear

Mother, my atmosphere;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
World-mothering air, air wild,
Wound with thee, in thee isled,
Fold home, fast fold thy child.
xii Prologue
I have found a few works devoted explicitly to the role of the

Blessed Virgin in Dante, not all of them by Catholics. There is a lit-
tle book of Hellmut Schnackenburg, a marvelous study by Jaroslav
Pelikan, and moving little books by Domenico Bassi and Renato
Nicodemo.1 They are, in their different ways, edifying. That is what
Dante aimed at explicitly in the Divine Comedy: to move us from
the misery of sin to the happiness of salvation. And he emphasized
the essential providential role of Mary in helping us to make that
transition.
The Catholic can see Dante’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin in
warm continuity with his or her own beliefs and practices. Central
as Mary is to the Divine Comedy, she has become even more central
in Catholic belief in the centuries since it was written. In the seven-
teenth century, St. Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort wrote that the
role of Mary in the life of the Church would become ever more pro-
nounced in what he called “these last days.”2 And Father Frederick
Faber ended his preface to the English translation of de Montfort’s
work with a prayer for the “speedy coming of that great age of the
Church which is to be the Age of Mary!” The prophesy has been ful-
filled and the prayer answered. Pope John Paul II’s personal motto—
“Totus tuus sum Maria” (Mary, I am all yours)—had a Montfortian
ring to it.
The nineteenth century saw the Catholic definition of Mary’s
Immaculate Conception and the twentieth century the definition
of the Assumption of Mary, body and soul, into heaven. We might
link the first with Mary’s appearance to Bernadette at Lourdes in the
mid-nineteenth century, where she identified herself as “I am the Im-
maculate Conception.” There is less of a link between the dogma of
the Assumption and the visions of Mary by three shepherd children
at Fatima, Portugual, in the early twentieth, but the official Church
sanction of those apparitions is eloquent of Mary’s unique role in our
salvation. Perhaps the present century will see the definition of Mary
as Mediatrix of all Graces. Such definitions are a corroboration of
the faith of the Church. Dante and millions of others believed these
truths about Mary without any official definition of them.
Some have responded to these definitions as if they were novel
ties introduced into Christian faith, but they are not. Ours is an
Prologue xiii
apostolic faith, and our beliefs accordingly must be in warm and es-
sential continuation with the deposit of faith entrusted to the Apos-
tles. Any conception of the development of doctrine that ignored this
connection would be wrong. One of the saddest things in human his-
tory has been the divisions among those who are Christians. No one,
I think, addressed the misgivings of non-Catholics to the develop-
ment of Marian doctrine more effectively than Charles De Koninck.3
As a very young man, he wrote a little book addressing the way in
which certain scriptural passages from the Canticle of Canticles and
from the Wisdom books are applied to the Blessed Virgin Mary in
the liturgy.4 One could make a small florilegium of those attributions
from the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin. And of course, there is
the Litany of the Blessed Virgin. To find such devotion to Mary, such
insistence on her unique role, excessive is to fail to see the nature of
the history of salvation.
~ I would have been less than frank if I had not begun with these
few animadversions, which explain, if they do not justify, why such
an amateur as myself would dare to produce yet another book on
Dante. Jorge Luis Borges, a lapsed Catholic but perhaps at the end
reconciled, like Dante’s figure of Buonconte in the Purgatorio, said
this with reference to the essay “Introduction à un poème sur Dante”
by Paul Claudel: “Claudel has written—in a page unworthy of Paul
Claudel—that the spectacles awaiting us after death will no doubt
little resemble those that Dante showed us in the Inferno, the Pur-
gatorio, and the Paradiso.”5 That is a large subject, and there is much
with which one might quibble in this essay by that greatest of modern
Catholic poets,6 but there is also much in it to ponder and to praise,
not least Claudel’s comparison of a philosophia perennis and a poesis
perennis, the latter exemplified by Dante and the Comedy. Few things
could be more profitable than comparing Santayana’s Three Philo-
sophical Poets and this essay of Paul Claudel. Poets like Claudel are in
the direct line from Dante Alighieri.
Like his great predecessor, John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI
has taken to ending his encyclicals with an explicit reference to the
Blessed Virgin. The final paragraph of Spe Salvi (Saved in Hope) is
xiv Prologue
entitled “Mary, Star of Hope.” Benedict begins with a discussion of

the Ave maris stella and links Mary’s role to the stars by which sailors
would navigate the sea. Life is a journey, and “Who more than Mary
could be a star of hope for us? With her ‘yes’ she opened the door of
our world to God himself; she became the living Ark of the Cove-
nant, in whom God took flesh, became one of us, and pitched his tent
among us (cf. John 1:14).”
No t e o n T r a n s l a t i o n s ,
Ed i t i o n s , a n d Abb r e v i a t i o n s
Prosaic language easily gives way to translation, to a restatement in

equally impersonal words. Euclid alone may have looked on beauty
bare, as Edna St. Vincent Millay said, but who has not learned his
Euclid in translation? Logicians speak disdainfully of natural lan-
guages, supposedly rife with ambiguity, and urge upon us the mer-
its of their austere p’s and q’s. But there are uses of language which
resist being turned into another form, let alone another language.
Preeminent among them is poetry. Whenever language is something
other than a pure medium, what is being said becomes inseparable
from the how.
For many years I taught a course called “Dante and Aquinas.” St.
Thomas attracts translators in the dozens; it is difficult to resist the
temptation to carry over into English that limpid prose. Having suc-
cumbed to it myself, I have learned how difficult a task translation
can be. It can be done, more or less well or badly, but the convic-
tion grows on the reader of the Divine Comedy that, while this work
may be disguised in other languages, it resists the effort. Neverthe-
less, translations of Dante multiply, although every translator seems
somewhat sheepish about what he or she has done. The suggestion is
that while the reader may make do with Dante in English, or French,
or German, finally, Dante can speak to us only in the original.
xv
xvi Note on Translations, Editions, and Abbreviations
In the course I mentioned I was always concerned that the stu-

dents had before them the originals, Thomas in Latin and Dante in
Italian. This was not meant to turn them into pedants but rather to
provide the occasion for hearing the original voices of our two au-
thors. In recent years, Patrick Gardner served as my course assis-
tant and generously offered to give quick crash courses in Latin and
Italian—in the evenings, with attendance quite voluntary. All but one
or two students availed themselves of that opportunity. It takes a long
time before one can easily read the Comedy in the original, much
less all the explanatory notes. But one can, like T. S. Eliot, begin read-
ing Dante even before knowing any Italian, enjoying its music before
grasping its meaning.
In what follows, I almost always provide the original Italian of
Dante before an English version of it. Unless otherwise noted, these
English translations are my own. The originals on which I rely are
Dante Alighieri. Commedia. Con il commento di Anna Maria Chiavacci

Leonardi. 3 vols. Vol. 1, Inferno; Vol. 2, Purgatorio; Vol. 3, Paradiso.
Milan: Arnaldo Mondadori, 1991. (This became my preferred edi-
tion; Chiavacci Leonardi’s notes and comments are invariably
helpful.)
Dante Alighieri. Vita Nova. A cura Luca Carlo Rossi, Introduzione

Guglielmo Gorni. Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1999.
Dante Alighieri. Tutte le opere. A cura di Luigi Blasucci. Florence: G. C.

Sansoni Editore, 1981. For the Convivio and the Letter to Can
Grande.
English translations of St. Thomas Aquinas and other Latin and Ital-
ian sources are also my own. Biblical quotations generally follow The
Holy Bible, New American Catholic Edition (New York: Benziger
Brothers, 1952). In referring to Psalms I provide the Vulgate number
and the alternate numbering of the Hebrew text.
Note on Translations, Editions, and Abbreviations xvii
Abbreviations in the chapters include:
Ep. 13 Epistole 13 (Dante’s Letter to Can Grande)

Inf. Inferno
Par. Paradiso
Purg. Purgatorio
ST Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae
VN Vita Nuova
O NE
A New Life Begins
La donna gentile: The gentle lady
The Blessed Virgin Mary is the key to Dante. We find her there be-
hind the scenes at the very beginning of the Commedia, since it is
her compassion for the wandering poet that sets the great journey in
motion, through intermediaries; we find her there at the end in the
magnificent closing cantos of the Paradiso, the very gate of heaven.
And, as we shall see, her role becomes ever more explicit throughout
the great poem. In the Vita Nuova, an earlier work of Dante, Mary
is present as the object of the young Beatrice’s devotion, a devotion
that is contagious, although it is difficult to think that Dante was ever
entirely devoid of it. With his love for Beatrice, for her beauty, and for
her virtue, that devotion intensifies, and after her death—not imme-
diately, to be sure, but only after and despite dalliance with another
woman, whom he treats as a mere bagatelle in the Vita Nuova1 and
puts to allegorical purpose in another earlier work, the Convivio—his
love for Beatrice finally emerges in his great poem as the means of his
salvation. Lost in a dark wood, threatened by the beasts within him,
he acknowledges that after Beatrice’s death he had fallen into vices
1
2 Dante and the Blessed Virgin
that endangered his soul. In the Vita Nuova, his love for Beatrice is
filtered through the requirements of courtly love and only gradually
transcends them. In the Comedy, Beatrice’s role in Dante’s conver-
sion, in his salvation, is given immortal expression.
So isn’t it Beatrice, not Mary, who is the key to Dante? There are
moments in the Vita Nuova when the two seem almost to fuse, and
the reader feels uneasiness at certain descriptions of Dante’s beloved
in which the devotee is almost identified with the object of her de-
votion. The two women are inseparably linked, and in the Comedy
they will be joined with another, St. Lucy; Dante scholars will write
of the tre donne, the three women, and for good reason, as we shall
see. But the preeminence of Mary is never in doubt. To call Mary
Dante’s alpha and omega would be too much, of course: her role is
always that of a mediatrix. It is in her Son, her spouse, her creator,
that Dante’s heart will find its rest. At the end of the Comedy, Dante,
thanks to Mary’s intercession, is given a glimpse of the Trinity, of the
“love that moves the sun and other stars,” and returns to recount his
journey. The Divine Comedy is the poetic expression of the journey
any sinner must make if he would realize his very reason for being.2
The sublimation of Dante’s love for Beatrice in the Vita Nuova
and the poet’s transfiguration of his beloved might tempt us to think
that the role of Mary, too, is largely a poetic device. There have been
quarrels among scholars as to whether the Beatrice of the Vita was
an actual historical person, since the young woman can so easily be
interpreted in terms of various abstractions. Did the Beatrice of the
Vita have any actual Florentine counterpart? The answer is Yes, but
the tendency to allegorize her out of existence is not unfounded. That
in turn may suggest that the Mary of Dante’s great poem is also a
pardonable poetic exaggeration, a Florentine excess. It would be a
profound mistake to think so.
The Blessed Virgin of the Comedy is the Blessed Virgin of Chris-
tian faith. One of the unfortunate and doubtless unintended effects of
the Reformation has been to create among many believers suspicion
as to Mary’s role in the plan of salvation. What need have we for any
mediator but Christ himself? Devotion to Mary is thought to intrude
between the soul and God, or to divert the soul in its journey to God.
It is a commonplace that many converts found the Catholic emphasis
A New Life Begins 3
on Mary a great obstacle to be overcome. John Henry Newman—I

am tempted to say, even John Henry Newman—felt this for a time.
Dante has softened this suspicion for many, enabling them to
regard Mary as a character in a poem so that disbelief could be sus-
pended for the nonce. But the Mary of the poem never speaks except
in words taken from the Gospels, and she is no more an invention
or a mere device than are Hell and Purgatory and Heaven. Whatever
Dante says of her is grounded in Scripture, the Church fathers, the
great doctors of the Church in the Middle Ages, and in the liturgy,
art, and music of the Church. If that doctrine, that Mariology, has
been lost or attenuated for us, Dante provides a powerful means of
recovering it. Any reader who has fears to be allayed should consider
these words of St. Bernard of Clairvaux: “There is no doubt that what-
ever we offer in praise of the Mother, pertains to the Son; and, when
we honor the Son, we do not take away from the glory of the Mother.
For if, The wise son is the glory of the father, as Solomon says, how
much more glorious does that make the mother of Wisdom?”3
Incipit Vita Nova
If we know nothing else about Dante, we know him as the author of

the Divine Comedy. This great poem, however, is the culmination of a
writing career that began with lyric poems in the Provençal or trou-
bador tradition. In the Vita Nuova, he gathers some of those poems
into an account that is deceptively simple—on the surface.
It is not uncommon for a poet, particularly a lyric poet, to make
himself the subject of his poetry. Nonetheless, any reader will be ini-
tially struck by the confidence with which Dante regards himself as
a mirror of the human condition. His life is not a random sequence
of events but an intelligible story with a beginning, a middle, and
an end.
That Dante draws selectively on his memory is clear from the
opening lines of the Vita Nuova. The memories to be recalled are
governed by the event when “a new life begins” (Incipit Vita Nova),
the Latin rubric under which the book is written and which provides
the title (in Italian, Vita Nuova) of the little book. It is an ingenious
interplay of prose and verse. The poems may have antedated the com-
position of the book, but they are so deftly folded into the narrative as
to make a whole, and we are invited to take the poems as contempo-
rary comments on the prosaic events.
The structure of the book can be discerned in the arrangement
of the poems on which Dante, remembering, comments. Dante is at
once a personage in the narrative and the narrator; as the latter, he
seeks the meaning of his love for Beatrice. Of the thirty-one poems
that alternate with prose, thirty are either sonnets or odes (canzoni)
and one is a ballad. Their arrangement is not random, and the prose
sections underscore this fact.
The opening paragraph, later referred to as the prologue, is this:
In quella parte del libro della mia memoria dinanzi alla quale poco
si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice Incipit Vita
Nova. Sotto la quale rubrica io trovo scripte le parole le quali è mio
intendimento d’asemplare in questo libello, e se non tutte, almeno la
loro sententia. (VN 1.1)
In the part of the book of my memory before which there is little

legible there is a rubric which says, A New Life Begins. Under this
rubric I find written words whose meaning it is my intention to set
forth in this little book, if not all of them, at least their substance.
The next sentence begins with nove, nine, the number that is
“friendly to Beatrice” and whose function is far more theological than
numerological. Nine = 3 × 3, and 3 is the number of the Trinity. The
prominence of nine is clear in the opening chapter, which tells of the
author’s first meeting with Beatrice. It is the basis of Dante’s calling
Beatrice a miracle.
Dante’s story in the opening chapter is well known. At the age of
nine, he sees Beatrice (la gloriosa donna de la mia mente) for the first
time, herself just beginning her ninth year. She is humble and hon-
est, dressed as befits her age, and of course, beautiful (although, as
has been pointed out, Dante never calls her beautiful in the physical
sense: his infatuation, his love, goes deeper than that). His reaction is
seismic.4 He trembles, he is shaken, and he switches to Latin: “Ecce
A New Life Begins 5
Deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur michi!” (Behold, here is a

god stronger than I who is coming to dominate me!).
The occurrence of occasional Latin sentences among the Italian
is significant. First was Incipit Vita Nova and then the “Ecce Deus,”
quickly followed by “Apparuit iam beatitudo vestra!” (Now appears
your beatitude!) and “Heu miser, quia frequenter impeditus ero dein-
ceps!” (Alas, how often I will be disturbed from now on!). It is as if
these Latin sentences govern the Italian narrative; their meaning is of
heightened importance. That Beatrice’s name is linked with beatitude,
happiness, is underscored by the Latin beatitudo. She did not seem to
be the daughter of a mortal man, but of a god, Dante remarks, quot-
ing Homer. As a mere boy, he sought out occasions when he might
catch a glimpse of her. After telling us this, he states that he will not
dwell on it because it might seem an exercise in fiction to ascribe such
passions and actions to one so young. He will go on to what, in the
book of memory, comes under more important headings. But first he
makes clear that his love for Beatrice is not merely a thing of the pas-
sions; that love is always under the counsel and aegis of reason. That
is, his feelings are governed by intelligence, not vice versa.
Nine years after the first encounter with Beatrice he sees her
again, clothed all in white and accompanied by two older ladies. She
looks at him and greets him with indescribable courtesy, “which is
now rewarded in a greater sphere.” This is our first overt clue that at
the time of writing, Beatrice is already dead,5 and thus there is nar-
rative tension between what Dante the narrator knows and what the
Dante who figures in the narration knows. It happened that it was the
ninth hour of the day when Beatrice looked at him so tenderly.
After this meeting and greeting, Dante, inebriated by the sweet-
ness of her voice, repairs to his room where, in his sleep, he has a
vision. An imposing figure appears, and of the many things he says,
Dante recalls only “Ego dominus tuus” (I am thy God). The figure is
the god of love, and he holds in his arms the sleeping figure of Bea-
trice, covered with a crimson cloth. The god also holds in his hand a
fiery object and says to Beatrice, “Vide cor tuum.” Beatrice awakens,
and the god has her eat Dante’s heart. Whereupon the god, grieving,
ascends with the lady to heaven. On waking, Dante realizes that all
this has occurred in the fourth hour of the night, that is, the first of
the nine last hours of night. And then follows the first sonnet of the
Vita Nuova, which Dante intends to show to his fellow poets, among
them certainly his good friend Guido Cavalcanti:
A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core

nel cui cospecto ven lo dir presente,
in ciò che mi riscriva ’n suo parvente,
salute in lor segnor, cioè Amore.
Già eran quasi che alterzate l’ore
del tempo che omne stella n’è lucente,
quando m’apparve Amor subitamente,
cui essenza membrar mi dà orrore.
Allegro mi sembrava Amor tenendo
meo core in mano, e nelle braccia avea
madonna involta in un drappo dormendo.
Poi la svegliava, e d’esto core ardendo
lei paventosa umilmente pascea.
Apresso gir lo ne vedea piangendo.
(VN 1.21–23)
In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s translation,
To every heart which the sweet pain doth move,

And unto which these words may now be brought
For true interpretation and kind thought,
Be greeting in our Lord’s name, which is Love.
Of those long hours wherein the stars, above,
Wake and keep watch, the third was almost nought
When Love was shown me with such terrors fraught
As may not carelessly be spoke of.
He seemed like one who is full of joy, and had

My heart within his hand, and on his arm
My lady, with a mantle round her, slept;
Whom (having waken’d her) anon he made
To eat that heart; she ate, as fearing harm.
Then he went out; and as he went, he wept.6
A New Life Begins 7
We notice that the sonnet does not mention the god ascending
toward heaven with Beatrice. At the time it was written, Dante did
not realize the role his beloved was to play in the Comedy. His poem,
like those of the poets whose thoughts on it he solicits, is written
within the bounds of courtly love. And he reports that Guido’s reply,
in a sonnet of his own, seals their friendship.
As the narrative continues, the conventions of such verse con-
tinue. Dante finds himself in a room with Beatrice. When he gazes at
her, another woman is in his line of sight, which misleads others as
to the object of his affection. This screen lady, as she is called (Dante
refers to her as a “screen to the truth”), will play her role for a time,
enabling Dante to conceal that the true object of his love is Beatrice.
Meanwhile, he composes a list of sixty women and, mirabile dictu,
Beatrice’s name is ninth on the list. Then the screen lady leaves town
and Dante writes a sonnet, seemingly addressed to her, but in truth
addressed to Beatrice.
This sonnet begins in a way that must capture our attention: “O
voi che per la via d’Amor passate, / attendete e guardate / s’elli è dolore
alcun, quanto ’l mio, grave” (O all ye who pass by the way of Love,
look and see if there is any sorrow like unto mine). Lest we fail to
recognize the allusion, Dante, in the prose explanation of the sonnet,
directs us to the Prophet Jeremiah: “O vos omnes qui transitis per
viam, attendite et videte si est dolor sicut dolor meus” (O all ye who
pass by the way, look and see if there is any sorrow like unto mine).
Did the poet, when he wrote these words, simply pick them up from
the Christian ambience and forget to what liturgical purpose they
had been put? In the Vita Nuova he makes the biblical reference clear
but not its application. These words of Jeremiah are attributed in the
Catholic liturgy to the Blessed Virgin, the Mater Dolorosa, when she
meets Jesus carrying his cross to Golgotha. Doubtless the reader is
meant to remember this liturgical use, and it is an indication of the
significance to Dante of the life and death of Beatrice.
As with certain descriptions of Beatrice, the reader is likely to feel
uneasiness at the way in which this originally childish love becomes,
in Dante’s recall, intertwined with references to Christ and to Mary.
The account is posthumous, Beatrice is dead when it is written, but
before her actual death in the narrative, Dante will dream it, will see
her on her deathbed, and when she dies will describe its cosmic effect
by appeal to what happened when Our Lord died on the cross. And
the lady of a friend in the Vita Nuova—her name is Giovanna—will
be compared to John the Baptist, the voice crying in the wilderness,
calling for repentance and preparing for the coming of the Messiah.
Scholars call attention to the biblical echoes.7
Few figures from the Gospel accounts impress themselves on the
believer’s mind and imagination more than the son of Mary’s cousin
Elizabeth, namely, John the Baptist. A surprising number of direct
quotations from John are given us in the Gospels, and to the pres-
ent day they have captivated writers, not least Albert Camus, whose
judge penitent is named Jean-Baptiste Clamant. John the Baptist is
a vox clamantis, a voice crying in the wilderness. Is the evocation by
Dante merely a similar literary use? Or does it cut deeper than that?
What are we to make of the Vita Nuova? It is a love story, of
course, but one which, in the manner of courtly love, seems to float
free of possession. The actual Beatrice eventually married, but her
husband is as unimportant to Dante as Daisy Buchanan’s was to
Gatsby. (For that matter, Gemma, Dante’s wife, never makes it onto
the page.)8 From the outset, the love that is celebrated is remarkably
asexual. That could be accounted for by the troubador tradition. The
woman stirs the imagination and devotion of the man; she is seen
as the embodiment of beauty, physical and spiritual. The flesh and
blood woman is so transmuted by this intense sublimation that she
can seem hardly more than an occasion for the poet to celebrate her.
In Dante’s case, however, the sublimation echoes with scriptural allu-
sions; the religious meaning is essential.
Beatrice is presented as having a profound devotion to the
Blessed Virgin, so much so that after her death Dante thinks of her
as enthroned in heaven with Mary: “quando lo Signore della iusti-
tia chiamòe questa gentilissima a gloriare sotto la ’nsegna di quella
Regina benedecta Maria, lo cui nome fue in grandissima reverenzia
nelle parole di questa Beatrice beata” (when the Lord of Justice called
this most gentle one to glory under the ensign of Mary that blessed
Queen, whose name was ever spoken with the greatest reverence by
that blessed Beatrice [VN 19.1]). Dante’s reader grows accustomed to
his way of intermingling the sacred and profane, the physical and
A New Life Begins 9
spiritual, the temporal and eternal. We are not surprised that eventu-
ally he will find a kindred spirit in Bernard of Clairvaux, the austere
yet passionate Cistercian, whose love for Mary may seem to the cyni-
cal the compensation of the celibate.
The Vita Nuova is saturated with theological references. Our
rather limited interest in it is the role Mary plays in this early work.
The new life would seem to be the result of a conversion—you shall
have life, and that more abundantly. The role of Beatrice, at first the
object of a young boy’s infatuation, evolves into a salvific one. She is
Dante’s beatitude, the means of his turning to a concern for his eter-
nal beatitude. Some scholars have stressed this evolution in terms of
Dante’s changing understanding of his purpose as a poet. In the trou-
bador tradition, the beloved is the cause of pain. More importantly, as
Charles Singleton has pointed out, the beloved seems an alternative
to the lover’s true good.9 Many troubadors ended their lives in mon-
asteries, doing penance, as it were, for the loves they had celebrated.
One is reminded of Chaucer’s Retractions in his Canterbury Tales, in
which he expresses remorse that his works may have been occasions
of sin to his readers.10 But the troubadors were remorseful for their
deviation from the true object of love, God. Singleton claims that
Dante’s great achievement is to have recognized the rivalry of loves
and to have solved it. When Dante turns to God, Beatrice remains.
She is not an impediment; she is the facilitator of his salvation.
The device of the “screen lady” in the Vita Nuova suggests a dar-
ing hypothesis. If another lady could provide the means of conceal-
ing Dante’s true love, could it be that Beatrice herself is something
of a screen lady? Beatrice’s devotion to Mary and the description of
her ascension into heaven at her death calls to mind Our Lady’s as-
sumption into heaven.11 As Guglielmo Gorni writes, “From her birth
Beatrice was destined for heaven, precociously summoned to ‘glory
under the ensign of Mary that blessed Queen.’ ”12 And to Beatrice is
applied the attribute par excellence of Mary, that is, gratia plena, full
of grace. As Gorni also observes, “It is without doubt that in the Vita
Nuova the similarity to Mary works in tandem with that of Beatrice
as figure of Christ.”13
Thus, without in any way calling into question the historical reality
of Beatrice, we find in the Vita Nuova a progressive understanding of
the role she plays for Dante. Things said about her make it clear that
she is a figure both of Christ and of Mary. In that sense, it does not
seem fanciful to think of her as a screen lady. At the end of the Vita,
Dante realizes that he must now speak of her in quite a different way
than he had in the earlier poems that the little book incorporates. His
understanding of the kind of poet he must become is integral to this
realization. He will become a theological poet.
In keeping with the interpretation that Dante now views himself
as a new kind of poet, the Vita Nuova ends with a memorable resolu-
tion. Dante is dissatisfied with what he has accomplished. He longs to
celebrate his love for Beatrice more adequately, but in order to do that
a good deal more is required of him. After the last sonnet he writes:
Apresso questo sonetto apparve a me una mirabile visione, nella

quale io vidi cose che mi fecero proporre di non dire più di questa
benedecta infino a tanto che io potessi più degnamente tractare di lei.
E di venire a ciò io studio quanto posso, sì com’ella sae, veracemente.
Sì che, se piacere sarà di Colui a cui tutte le cose vivono, che la mia
vita duri per alquanti anni, io spero di dire di lei quello che mai non
fue detto d’alcuna. E poi piaccia a colui che è sire della cortesia che
la mia anima sen possa gire a vedere la gloria della sua donna, cioè di
quella benedecta Beatrice, la quale gloriosamente mira nella faccia di
Colui “qui est per omnia secula benedictus.” (VN 31)
After this sonnet a wonderful vision came to me, in which I saw

things which caused me to resolve to say nothing further of this
blessed one in order that I might more worthily treat of her. To that
end, I study as much as possible, as she truly knows. Accordingly,
should it please Him by whom all things live that my life endure
for some years, I hope to say of her what has never been said of any
woman. May it then be pleasing to Him who is Lord of courtesy that
my soul may go and see the glory of that lady, that is of the blessed
Beatrice, who looks gloriously on the face of Him who is forever and
ever blessed.
Who will not see in this promissory note the intention to write
the Commedia? Alas, matters are blurred by the fact that Dante’s next
A New Life Begins 11
major work was the Convivio, not the Commedia. In the Convivio we
are told that Dante has devoted himself to thirty months of study in
the religious houses of Florence, that is, in the house of study of the
Franciscans, Santa Croce, and that of the Dominicans, Santa Maria
Novella.14 The Convivio as we have it is a large work, and if its plan
had been carried to completion, it would have been massive. But it
was left incomplete. Why?
Dante in the Convivio had set himself the task of putting into
the vernacular language the Latin learning he had acquired in the
schools of philosophy and theology, to make it accessible to non-
scholars, both in prose and poetry. We notice that he assumes the role
of mediator between the learned and simple. The Convivio, however,
does not wear its learning lightly. Did Dante come to doubt the effec-
tiveness of what he was writing? Did he repent of portraying himself
as one who had transcended his love for Beatrice in order to devote
himself to philosophy and theology? Did he remember the resolution
with which the Vita Nuova ends and conceive a more effective way of
fulfilling it, a way that would eschew prose and rely on poetry alone?
This is speculative, to be sure, but so are all other accounts of why the
Convivio was left unfinished. In any case, the idea of the Commedia
was born. The intention to speak of Beatrice as no woman has ever
been spoken of before returned. Dante had prayed for time to ful-
fill that intention. His prayer was answered. The result was the most
magnificent poem ever written, one with immediate charm for any
reader but also one replete with allusions to the knowledge he had
gained, and with lore to keep scholars busy. The sheer bulk of Dante
studies make it impossible for anyone to profit from more than a frac-
tion of them.
Conscious of the difficulties of the task, let us now follow the
thread that binds it all together, the role of the Blessed Virgin in
Dante’s life and in the poem.
TWO
In the Midst of My Days
I said: In the midst of my days I shall go to the gates of hell.

I sought for the residue of my years.
—Isa. 38:10
Nel mezzo del cammin: Midway this way
The Commedia is divided into three parts, each called a “cantica”—

Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise—and contains a total of one hundred
cantos. The second and third parts have precisely thirty-three cantos
each; the first has the extra canto. The first canto of the first cantica is
a prologue to the entire poem. It begins thus:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita.
(Inf. 1.1–3)
Dorothy Sayers has translated this as well as anyone and better than
some (save perhaps for the rendering of smarrita) as:
13
Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,

I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.1
There is not a line of Dante, indeed scarcely a word of his, that

has not been subjected to scholarly analysis and thereby generated
some measure of division of opinion.2 Obviously, if the only way to
an understanding of the poem lay through the thicket of that scholar-
ship, we would be in a dark wood indeed, if not wholly lost and gone.
Scholarship and criticism are lovely things, so long as they bring us
back to what they study and criticize and do not substitute for it.
Dante scholarship, to the modest degree that I know it, is remarkably
free of the pedantry that is the death of learning.3 Dantisti, as they are
called, have by and large retained some measure of the wonder and
excitement of their first encounter with the poem. Needless to say,
all of us must first encounter the poem, read the Commedia, before
commentaries on it can make sense. Even in that first reading we
will be grateful for the notes in the edition with which we happen
to begin. Even readers for whom Italian is their mother tongue need
such notes.
Who cannot catch the literal sense of that opening tercet? Some-
one is speaking to us in the first person, telling us he woke up lost in a
dark wood. He is recalling his past and presuming our interest. And he
has it. It’s a great opening. One gets used to admiring Dante’s skill, but
of course one is simply calling attention to his own keen discernment.
It being clear, then, that the opening lines of the Commedia speak
immediately to a first reader, we are better prepared to see what
scholars can do to enhance our rereading. A rule of thumb for litera-
ture, C. S. Lewis suggested, is that it is something we reread.4 There are
stories and poems we read once and that’s that. They have given us all
they have. The things we go back to again and again are rich with lev-
els not apparent at first blush. In rereading we notice things we didn’t
notice before, and this deepens our appreciation. A critic such as G. K.
Chesterton brings us back to Chaucer or Dickens with more sensi-
tive antennae, and this heightens our enjoyment. In his Book of Prob-
lems, Aristotle asked, twice, why do we like the old songs best? It is not
true that familiarity always breeds contempt: there could be no happy
families if it were. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Not on

the first date, certainly, or not in the first moment of being smitten.
The comparison rides on, depends upon, loving the other person as
she or he is. (Though, as W. B. Yeats said of Lady Ann Gregory, “Only
God could love you for yourself alone, and not your yellow hair.”) So
too, any poem engages us first and then invites reflection. In the case
of Dante, that simple truth is not merely instantiated, it is required.
The Bible, Old and New Testaments, is read by or to the faithful
and, having been read, is analyzed in the homily. Believers reflect on
Holy Writ in the awareness that it is the Word of God speaking to us
in our own tongues. In the De doctrina christiana, St. Augustine gives
his account of the multiple senses of Scripture, the layers of meaning
in the sacred text. In the Summa theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas asks
whether Sacred Scripture has senses beyond the literal and replies:
It should be noticed that the author of Sacred Scripture is God in whose

power it is not only to make vocal sounds have meanings (even men
can bring this about) but also that the things themselves should mean.
While it is true that in any science, words have meanings, it is proper
to this science that the things signified by the words also signify some-
thing. The first meaning, whereby words signify things, is the primary
sense, the historical or literal sense. But the meaning whereby the things
signified by the words signify other things, is called the spiritual sense,
which is grounded in the literal and presupposes it. (ST Ia, q. 1, a. 10)
According to Thomas, this further, spiritual sense has been given var-
ious subdivisions. He himself divides the spiritual sense into the al-
legorical, the moral, and the anagogical senses. The allegorical sense
is exemplified in the way in which events in the Old Testament are
figures of the New Law. The moral sense is exemplified in the way in
which Christ’s words and actions, and what is said of Him, are signs
of what we ought to do. The anagogical sense points to eternal glory.
That the literal sense should be pregnant with these various spiritual
senses is attributed to God, who is the author of Sacred Scripture. So
what has all this to do with reading Dante?
Literary criticism has been called a secular form of biblical
criticism. Whatever truth there may be in this generalization, it is
necessarily true of Dante scholarship. In his letter to Can Grande

della Scala, dedicating the third cantica to this patron, Dante refers to
the Commedia as a whole and gives instructions on how to read it.
Dantisti differ as to the authenticity of this letter—the thirteenth
and last of Dante’s Latin epistles that we have—but such disputes
could scarcely interest us if we had not read it. Let us imagine our-
selves looking over the shoulder of its addressee, the imperial vicar
and lord of Verona, and let us take it to be from Dante.5 It begins with
an unctuously laudatory description of Can Grande and the memo-
rable self-description, “Dantes Alagherii, florentinus natione non
moribus” (Dante Alighieri, Florentine in nation but not in morals).
Praise of Can Grande continues through the first four paragraphs,
followed by the author’s discussion of his great poem.
He begins with a citation from a Latin translation of Aristotle’s
Metaphysics, Book 2: “sicut res se habet ad esse, sic se habet ad veri-
tatem” (the truth of things follows on the kind of being they have).
There are things that are what they are and yet are also related to other
things, as one who is a man may also be a father or son. The implica-
tion seems to be that since the great poem is related to the author, its
truth must be sought in that relationship. This is a rather ponderous
way of saying that it is to the author we should go to find out what the
poem is about. Dante then invokes a device devised by commentators
on classical works, namely, the prologue that precedes the analysis of
the text. There are six things that a commentator should do before
beginning his chief work; he should tell us what the subject of the
work is, who wrote it, its form, its end, its title, and to what part of
philosophy it belongs.
A first thing to notice about this is Dante’s unblushing applica-
tion to his own work of a requirement to be met by commentaries
on acknowledged classics. There is a modest foreshadowing of this
in the Vita Nuova in the didactic discussions that follow the poems.
Dante was probably acquainted with the requirements of a prologue
from reading Boethius, or Thomas Aquinas commenting on Aristo-
tle. Dante’s practice in the Vita Nuova might be said to have a prece
dent in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, that death-row classic
which also alternates poetry and prose. But surely to apply to his
own work the conventions of the classical commentary is somewhat
astonishing. It tells us at least two things. First, Dante had no doubt

of the importance of what he had accomplished. Second, he believes
that his great poem is as well-thought-out as any classical treatise and
can thus sustain, even invite, close scrutiny.
This initial astonishment is soon followed by another greater
one. Dante applies to the Commedia the techniques of biblical
interpretation:
It should be known that this work has not only a simple sense, indeed it
can be called polysemous, that is, of several senses; for the first sense is
had in the letter and another is given through what is signified literally.
The first sense is called the literal, the second allegorical, or moral, or
anagogical. (Ep. 13.7)
Lest we miss the parallel, Dante goes on to illustrate these various

senses by analyzing two verses of Scripture: “When Israel went out
of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Juda was made
his sanctuary, Israel his kingdom” (Ps. 113[114]:1–2).
If we take only the literal meaning of this passage, it tells us of the
exodus from Egypt of the sons of Israel at the time of Moses. But if
we take it allegorically, it refers to our redemption by Christ; its moral
sense tells us of the conversion of our souls from the grief and misery
of sin to the state of grace; and its anagogical sense tells us of the exit
of the saintly soul from the slavery of this corrupt world to the free-
dom of eternal glory. Dante adds that all of these mystical senses can
be gathered under the appellation allegorical in that they are another
(alleon) sense that differs from the historical or literal sense.
With that in hand, Dante turns to the Commedia and indicates
its various senses. Literally, it concerns simply the state of souls after
death, for on this topic the whole work turns. However, taken allegori
cally, its subject is man insofar as by the merit or demerit consequent
upon his free actions he is eternally and justly rewarded or punished.
The poem will show us souls after death and make clear how their
condition, whether of weal or woe, was freely and justly achieved.
This application of the senses of Scripture to the Commedia
poses problems, to which Dante refers elsewhere.6 The obvious dif-
ficulty arises from the way St. Thomas spoke of those further senses
of Scripture—the way the things meant by the words can mean yet
other things—as something of which only God, not man, is capable.
After all, He is the creator of things. A preliminary resolution of this
difficulty for Dante might be sought in the fact that the story of the
Commedia is essentially the story of Scripture, that is, the story of
salvation or damnation. The characters and episodes put before us
may not be biblical, but the allegorical meaning of the poem is. This
is clear from the fact that the allegorical sense that chiefly interests
Dante is the moral.
Continuing with the classical demands of a prologue, he asks to
which part of philosophy the Commedia falls. We will waive for the
moment any discussion of the special problem posed by the philo-
sophical or theological poet. Surely poetry is one thing and philoso-
phy another; a fortiori, theology differs from poetry. But it would be
premature to consider this difficulty now. The answer Dante gives is
that the Commedia falls to moral philosophy. That follows from his
announced end or purpose of the work: “The point of the work in
whole and in part is to move those living in this life from a state of
misery and lead them to a state of happiness” (Ep. 13.15).
One further question from the letter to Can Grande: Why is the
poem called a comedy? Dante’s answer presupposes that tragedy ends
in bitter defeat, whereas comedy has a happy ending. “And thus it is
clear why the present work is called the Comedy. For if we look to the
matter, from a horrible and fetid beginning, which is Hell, it moves in
the end to the desirable and gracious Paradise” (Ep. 13.10).
La diritta via: The narrow way
At the opening of the Inferno we found Dante lost in a dark wood

at midlife. What is midlife? “The sum of our years is seventy, and if
we are strong, eighty” (Ps. 89[90]:10). The authoritative biblical span
being seventy years, the Dante of the poem is at the halfway point of
thirty-five.7 Of course, there is optimism in this; Dante did not live
to see his seventieth year. But he is not predicting so much as apply-
ing to himself the well-known biblical text. He was born in 1265, his
life overlapping those of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure—both of
whom died in 1274—for nine years. That makes the year of the poem
1300, the year of the first Jubilee, called by Pope Boniface VIII, when
the faithful made a pilgrimage to Rome to visit the great churches
and to see such marvels as the Veil of Veronica. (Dante alludes to
this veil in the Vita Nuova, and later, in the Comedy, he describes a
pilgrim come from afar, perhaps Croatia, whose lifelong hope is real-
ized when he sees the veil on which is imprinted the bloody face of
Christ.)
Not only is the poem set in 1300, it begins in Holy Week on Good
Friday and proceeds through Easter, until in the Paradiso such tem-
poral references drop away. By some calculations, the activities of the
Inferno are covered in a single day. Jubilee signifies a call for repen-
tance and atonement, Holy Week the passion and death of Christ that
won our salvation, and Easter the hope of our own resurrection and
eternal bliss. It is helpful, though not immediately necessary, to know
this in order to grasp the sense of the dark wood in which Dante has
awakened.
He is filled with fear by his surroundings and doubts that he has
words to describe it; the mere memory of it is bad enough. How did
he get there? He cannot say, so weary was he when he wandered from
the true path, la verace via. He is in a valley, a forbidding hill looms,
but a glimpse of sun causes him to take heart. And then he is suddenly
assailed by three beasts. First a leopard comes and stands athwart his
path; it is described in pleasing detail. Then comes another beast, a
lion, soon to be joined by a wolf.
The obvious sense of this encounter is that Dante, having wan-
dered from the right path, is prevented from finding his way by the
appearance of these wild beasts. Even on a first reading we pick up
clues that Dante’s plight carries meanings beyond the surface sense.
What is the right path (la diritta via), and what is the relevance of
being thirty-five to someone lost in the woods? The occurrence of
both “our” (nostra) and “me” (mi) in those first lines draw us into the
scene, suggesting that Dante’s situation is at once his and very likely
ours. Halfway through the journey we all make, he finds himself lost.
The suggestion is that we are all on the way, pilgrims, and that life it-
self is aimed at something. The end is death, certainly, but death is not
a destination so much as an ending. St. Thomas, in his commentary
on verses 5–6 of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, where Paul is

speaking of the reward awaiting the faithful after death, provides us
with the assumption behind the scene: “In the present life man is as it
were on a kind of journey, because he ought to aim at heaven.”8
The right path is the one that will take us beyond death to heaven.
We are willy-nilly mortal, but our eternal post-mortem condition is
up to us. Having read the letter to Can Grande, we know that Dante’s
aim in his great poem is to lead us from the misery and sin of our
present life into the glory and happiness of eternal life. When Thorn-
ton Wilder gave one of his novels the title Heaven’s My Destination,
he was plucking a phrase from a little jingle kids wrote in the front of
their schoolbooks, an evocation of childlike faith.9 There was nothing
ironic in that choice. Wilder’s readers, not so long ago, would have
responded to the title as to a truism.10 Dante’s contemporary readers
would have found the allegorical meaning of the Commedia as famil-
iar as the literal. Of course, the literal meaning of the poem—heaven
or hell—already invokes religious belief. It is the detail and imagery
of the afterlife, not the fact of it, that enriches the allegorical mean-
ing of the poem. That we are all pilgrims, something brought home
in a special way during a Jubilee year, would be a commonplace to
Dante’s readers. The Dante of the poem is a particular Florentine with
his quite definite life story and also, in a way, all of us.
Most of us have seen enough MGM movies to be acquainted with
the phrase ars gratia artis—art for art’s sake—and whatever we think
of its use as a motto for the run-of-the-mill film, we have probably
some sense of its meaning. “A poem should not mean / But be,” we
might remember, waiving the inanity of this phrase from Archibald
MacLeish’s “Ars poetica.” Isn’t Dante’s stated intention in writing the
Commedia a culpable confusion of genera? Edifying discourses are
one thing, but surely poetry is something else. Whoever thought that
the poetry, the music, the drama, and the novels we enjoy have any-
thing to do with the moral, let alone the religious, life? The answer
is, just about everybody until a short time ago and many writers and
readers still.
Flannery O’Connor, calling herself a hillbilly Thomist who read
a little bit of the Summa theologiae every day, said that all literature
is anagogical. All! Perhaps she had in mind that passage from the
Summa which explains the senses of Scripture. Did she mean that all
literature is ethical or religious?
Well, what is a story? Any story begins with a protagonist con-
fronting a dilemma that must be resolved, a problem, a crossroads.
And he or she must act. This protagonist will have a name, sometimes
the name of an historical character, but we will ask for more from a
story than we would from history. The protagonist’s efforts to resolve
the dilemma, to solve the problem, to take one road rather than an-
other, will encounter difficulties that he must overcome. They may
overcome him, or a first attempt may simply worsen his situation. But
he goes on. A story might give us a hero whose efforts take him more
and more deeply into trouble until a dark moment is reached when it
looks as if all is lost. Then, by his own efforts, and plausibly, he sees a
way out, takes it, and the problem with which he began is solved. End
of story.
This is more or less what we find in the Poetics of Aristotle. Why
are we interested in the activities of imaginary characters or the imag-
inary activities of historical characters—of Hamlet, David Copper
field, Becky Sharpe, the warden in Trollope, Jay Gatsby, Huckleberry
Finn, Caesar and Cleopatra, Richard II, and on and on, to invoke sto-
ries we read again and again? Imaginary frogs in real gardens, or real
frogs in imaginary gardens? In real life we rarely find the economy
of action that characterizes fiction. A story concentrates the mind
and imagination; the events have a beginning, a middle, and an end,
which confers a meaning on them. The end could be death or mar-
riage or finding El Dorado or nailing Al Capone for income tax eva-
sion or any number of things, but it is a solution that focuses the
account of someone addressing a problem.
We become involved in stories because their characters are in
some way ourselves. They are our better or worse selves, but not too
much the one or the other. We follow an imagined version of the
choices that make up any human life, choices that matter. We are
what we do, and characters in a story reveal who they are by their
actions and choices. In real life, bounders succeed and the innocent
suffer; they do in fiction, too, but the story makes sense of that in a
way real life seldom does. Any story worth reading again will tell us
something about the human condition we recognize as true. There is
something of Macbeth or Lady Macbeth in each of us, something of

Lord Jim, and something of Dante.
It matters what we read and enjoy. If we did not think the young
are better for reading Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald or J. D.
Salinger, why have millions of students been assigned Hamlet, The
Great Gatsby, or Catcher in the Rye? But better in what way? Cardi-
nal Newman, in “The Tamworth Reading Room,” made gentle fun
of those who thought that providing books for the masses would
have some kind of automatic effect in changing their lives for the bet-
ter. We could substitute the aim of the Carnegie Public Libraries or
the silly assumption of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 that anything
printed is sacred. Surely it would be excessive to think that being able
to appreciate Lord Jim would make the reader brave. And we mustn’t
forget Don Quixote, the character not the book.
If literature has a moral effect, it is more subtle than that. But, as
Delmore Schwartz put it, “In dreams begin responsibilities.” The ideals
and the models of action with which our reading furnishes the mind
and imagination provide a deep background for who we want to be or
want not to be. Of course it is silly to think that literature will make
us what we ought to be. Does it differ from moral philosophy in that?
Aristotle said that no one becomes good by studying moral philoso-
phy. Yet the only reason for studying it is that we might become better.
Aristotle’s point was that knowing what to do is not tantamount to
doing it. Moral philosophy, however, is less efficacious than literature,
not the other way around. Becoming the Archbishop of Sante Fe as we
read Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop engages us more
completely than reading about states of life in the Summa theologiae.
When Dante tells us that the Commedia is meant to lead us from
the misery of sin to the happiness of heaven, we can be sure that he
has at least as keen a sense as do we of the distance between his poem
and any conversion of ours. But distance does not mean irrelevance.
The leopard, the lion, and the wolf
The beasts that menace Dante in the first canto of the Commedia stand
for something. What? A good and common guess is Lust, Pride, and
Avarice. Since the first canto is a prologue to the entire poem, we will
meet these beasts again, the beasts within us: “all that is in the world
is the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life”
(1 John 2:16). “I am a little world made cunningly / Of elements, and
an Angelike spright,” wrote John Donne,11 but the earliest reflections
on human life take into account this division within ourselves. The
good that we would, we do not; the evil that we would not do, that
we do. We find the thought in Ovid as well as in St. Paul. Plato told a
story in the Republic of the soul’s being incarcerated in the body and
thus losing the knowledge that it previously had of reality. We find
ourselves prisoners in a cave, mistaking shadows and images for their
real counterparts. Liberation from the cave may seem to be simply a
matter of gaining knowledge, but Plato knows that we have become
affectively attached to shadows and images. The task of philosophy
is to alter our affections as well as to change our minds, and to do
the one in order that the other might be brought about. In the words
chosen by Cardinal Newman for his tomb, Ex umbris et imaginibus
ad veritatem: Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth.
Why do we sin against the light of reason and fail to do what we
know is the good and fulfilling thing? Well, for one thing, we have
appetites other than will, or the rational appetite, and those lower ap-
petites can cloud the mind when we act. The immediate pleasurable
good to which we have become attached trumps the good recognized
by mind as our true good.
Dante, like Aristotle, did not think that evil was some thing that
attracts us. Only the good attracts; that is what we mean by good.
Evil as such repels, just as, on the level of sense, pain repels whereas
pleasure attracts. It is because there are goods and goods that we can
act defectively. A pleasure of the senses is a good, and we do not de-
cide to be drawn to it; it is natural that we should be so drawn. No
more do we decide to shrink from the prospect of pain. These affec-
tive responses, these natural appetites, do not of themselves propel us
to one course of action rather than another. All of us feel fear at the
prospect of bodily harm and death, but the brave person behaves one
way and the coward another. Kierkegaard’s aesthete, in his Either/Or,
as well as all of us in certain moods, imagines a mindless pursuit of
pleasure, self-contained and untrammeled by an antecedent warning
or subsequent remorse. This could only come about if we had natural

appetites and nothing more—that is, if we were mere animals. But we
have minds as well. “Are passions then the pagans of the soul, reason
alone baptized?” This is the question, taken from the English poet
Edward Young, that is the motto of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.
Only the good can attract us, but some goods are merely the satis-
faction of hunger or thirst or the sexual drive. If these desires were all
we were, there would be no moral task. The moral task is to integrate
the pursuit of these goods into the overall good of the acting person.
The beasts in the first canto can be taken to stand for our natural ap-
petites. If the pursuit of these is not subordinate to the judgment of
reason, it is disordered. That is what moral evil is, the disordered pur-
suit of a good. That is what has taken Dante from the true path and
brought him into a dark wood, into the misery of sin. And we all know
what that’s like.
The precise correlation of the three beasts with particular natural
appetites in Dante is not easy. Sometimes the leopard is interpreted
as lust, sometimes avarice. Efforts have been made to employ the Ar-
istotelian division of incontinence, malice, and bestiality to identify
the beasts as providing the rationale for the three main circles of hell.
There are political interpretations as well—the leopard is Florence,
the lion the king of France, and the wolf the Roman curia. That wider
possible significance underscores an important fact. Although Dante
finds himself alone in the dark wood, he is not the autonomous indi-
vidual of recent moral theory. For one thing, he is a Florentine, citi-
zen of a particular city and member of a definite family. One doesn’t
get into moral trouble in isolation; one cannot get out of it alone. We
are by nature social and political animals.
Mio maestro e ’l mio autore: My master, my author
A figure appears, and Dante appeals to him for help. “Have mercy on
me,” Dante cries, “be ye man or a shade of man.” The figure answers, ‘I
am no man, though man I was, my parents were from Lombardy and
both from the country of Mantua.’ ” Mantua me genuit. Born during
the reign of Caesar, he flourished under Augustus in a time of false

and lying gods.
Poeta fui, e cantai di quel giusto

figliuol d’Anchise che venne da Troia,
poi che ’l superbo Ilïón fu combusto.
(Inf. 1.73–75)
“I was a poet, and sang of that upright son of Anchises who came
from Troy after the burning of that pride of Ilion.” The figure is Vir-
gil, the poet of the Aeneid, the great epic that tells of the founding of
Rome. Dante is overwhelmed.
Tu se’ lo mio maestro et ’l mio autore,

tu se’ solo colui da cu’ io tolsi
lo bello stilo che m’ha farro onore.
(Inf. 1.85–87)
“But you are my master, my author,” Dante cries, “the one source
of that style for which I am so honored.” That said, Dante calls atten-
tion to the beasts that menace him, to which Virgil replies that he
must undertake another route if he wishes to escape this savage place.
As for the beasts, here some scholars find the basis for a political in-
terpretation, since Virgil predicts that a greyhound will come, defeat
the beasts, and restore Italy.12
Virgil offers himself as guide and gives a preview of the journey
before them. He will take Dante down through a realm where he
will hear the howls of desperation of those who lament their “second
death.” On they will travel to another realm, where there are souls
who can accept their pain because it is temporary and a prelude to
their joining the blessed. As for the blessed, Virgil tells Dante, he will
need another guide to go among them. At that point a soul more wor-
thy than Virgil will become Dante’s guide. “I’ll leave you in her care
when I depart.”
The schema of the Commedia is all here. To escape the dark wood,
Dante must descend into hell, the realm of despair, go on to purgatory,
where hope consoles the souls encountered there, and then on to the
realm of the blessed, guided by an unnamed woman.
Why Virgil? There is a plethora of reasons for Dante’s choice.
The first is the one first given. Dante is a poet who learned from
the master Virgil the pleasing style that has brought him fame. Who
could better guide a poet than another poet? Moreover, when they
visit Limbo, the first circle of hell and Virgil’s permanent home, from
which he has come to aid Dante, our author will be admitted into
the company of the greatest poets as their peer. All this is presented
as more or less matter of fact—another indication of Dante’s esti-
mate of his achievement as a poet. There is no false modesty here,
sometimes none at all. Another reason is that in the sixth book of
the Aeneid, Virgil had taken Aeneas into the underworld to see once
more his late beloved father, Anchises. Scholars note the parallels
and discrepancies between the underworld of the Aeneid and that
into which we are about to descend. In any case, Virgil is a knowl-
edgeable guide.
Yet what an odd choice to guide Dante to heaven—though only
to it, not into it, as Virgil himself remarks. As a pagan, unredeemed
by the grace of Christ, paradise is closed to him, and that means
human happiness in its fullness cannot be his. Virgil will lead Dante
to Limbo, which is his eternal place, and there they will meet other
good pagans, Plato and Aristotle and poets such as Horace and
Homer. Limbo is the place reserved for those who had only the light
of natural reason to guide them through life. The Jews had revelation,
of course, a covenant with God, and we will find half the celestial rose
in the Paradiso allotted to them. The difference between the sons of
Abraham and pagans is that the Israelites lived in the expectation of
the Messiah. Thus, when Christ came the Jews could be saved by his
sacrifice; they had anticipated the grace won by Christ.
Note that there are no alternative paths to ultimate happiness.
There is but one path, the one on which we follow Christ and by par-
ticipating in his grace can merit salvation. Nothing like the longing
for the Messiah can be expected among the pagans. But if Limbo is
where the highest natural happiness is enjoyed, the place does not
seem joyful. Indeed, there is a melancholy air about it. This is due,
as Virgil himself makes clear, to the fact that its inhabitants have
become aware that, through no fault of their own, they have missed
out on supernatural happiness.
We may think that there is something unjust about this. Why
were the chosen people chosen and the pagans left to their own de-
vices? Isn’t it unfair of God not to admit pagans into heaven? This
difficulty only makes sense if we think that paradise, that is, super-
natural happiness, the sharing in God’s very life and the sight of God
even as we are seen by Him, is naturally owed to anyone. But paradise
is wholly gratuitous. Things are owed us because of our nature, but
supernatural happiness, as the adjective suggests, is not among them.
A pagan in Limbo might lament that he was born where and when he
was, but of course he has no assurance that, born later and elsewhere,
he would have availed himself of the opportunity for salvation.
Limbo is the acknowledgment that many pagans lived good lives
simply in the light of natural reason. There is less talk of Limbo in
Catholic circles now, and Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the
Church, Lumen Gentium, seems to open up extraordinary ways in
which non-Catholic Christians, Jews, Muslims, and even atheists might
win through to paradise. If they live by their best lights, Lumen Gentium
suggests, this can enable them to participate, even unbeknownst, in the
grace of Christ. Whether or not this is a development of doctrine, the
essential point remains true. There is no salvation except through the
grace of Christ. Other medievals did not hesitate to canonize the good
pagans; Peter Abelard was particularly prodigal in this regard, and Vir-
gil appears in the stained glass windows of Chartres. But however the
matter is approached, a great mystery still lurks here. Why are some
given special opportunities and help, and others are not? The mystery
of predestination accompanies us through Dante’s pilgrim voyage and
is one of the last topics dealt with in the poem.
In any case, one of Virgil’s roles—or one aspect of his role—is to
represent reason, that is, the natural order. Plato and Aristotle had
lasting things to say about our overall aim in life and how it can be
attained, given our nature. They lay out the virtue and character re-
quired of us if we are to do the right deed for the right reason in
the fluctuating circumstances of life. But what relevance can Plato’s
Politics or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics have if we are called to an
end undreamt of by the philosophers? “For Christ did not send me to
baptize, but to preach the Good News, and not to preach that in terms
of philosophy in which the crucifixion of Christ cannot be expressed”
(1 Cor. 1:17).
In commenting on this passage, St. Thomas remarks that the hap-
piness presented and discussed by Aristotle is no longer the ultimate
end of human existence. Thomas, who was a great admirer of Aristo-
tle and wrote commentaries on a dozen of his treatises, did not regard
the philosophy of the ancients as having merely historical interest—
that is, he did not think of it as merely what people used to think who
had not heard the Good News. For him, the relationship between
natural and supernatural happiness is very similar to the more gen-
eral relationship between nature and “supernature,” or divine grace.
In the familiar phrase, grace builds on nature and does not destroy it.
Grace presupposes nature.
If we ask ourselves what man’s ultimate end is, we can mean either
of two questions. First, what is meant by the phrase “ultimate end”?
And second, given that meaning, what could serve as or play the role
of ultimate end for us? If by our ultimate end we mean happiness—
that which when obtained is sufficient, requires nothing else, is stable,
and so forth—we can then go on to ask whether pleasure or power or
wealth or fame and the like could fulfill the requirements of an ultimate
end. Both Plato and Aristotle provide conclusive reasons why none of
these can be the be-all and end-all of human life. Can anything?
Since rational activity is peculiar to man, Aristotle observed,
man’s fulfillment or happiness will lie in performing this function
well. “Virtue” is the substantive name for this adverbial modification
of our distinctive activity. A good physician is one who performs the
work of the physician well; a good novelist is a writer who produces
excellent novels; and so on. Once we know the function, we know
that the virtue or perfect accomplishment of that function is what
makes the one performing it good.
The fly in the ointment here is that “rational activity” seems to
have a plurality of meanings, not just one. Thus, if the virtue or excel-
lence of rational activity is the key to happiness, a plurality of virtues
must be required for human happiness, unless perhaps we want to say
that only one of the many meanings of “rational activity” counts.13
My point in recalling such debates is, first, to suggest another

reason for the choice of Virgil as Dante’s guide, and second, to under
score the layered approach that Dante takes to human life and its des-
tiny. Only the union with God that is promised us as a reward for
faith fulfills the notion of an ultimate end perfectly. What the ancient
philosophers sketched as fulfilling the notion is true up to a point, but
it is inadequate. It is true to the degree that it is a correct account of
human nature and of what would fulfill it. It is inadequate because we
see that such a virtuous life only imperfectly realizes the notion of the
ultimate end. Thomas thought he had found in Aristotle the admis-
sion that his account of what constitutes our happiness does not meet
all the requirements of an ultimate end. That is, the happiness we can
naturally achieve is imperfect.
Like Thomas Aquinas, Dante views the natural as presupposed
by the supernatural and as entering into the richer Christian vision of
human destiny, as a constituent of it. The sometimes puzzling inter-
mingling by Dante of pagan mythology and Christian doctrine under-
scores this view. Thomas sought to create a synthesis of all that could
be known by natural reason together with the truths learned only by
way of revelation. Dante undertakes a similar task in the Commedia.
Donna che si compiange: The Lady who weeps
Dante and Virgil, as we have seen, will travel first through the realm
of despair, where dwell those who have died “a second death,” hav-
ing lost not only mortal but also (a happy) immortal life; and then
on to a realm where they will find, despite the fire, souls content in
the hope that they will eventually move on to the third realm, that
of the blessed. In the realm of the blessed Dante will need another
guide. Virgil adds (in a puzzling statement) that the ruler of that
realm does not wish Virgil to enter it, “because I rebelled against his
law” (Inf. 1.125).14
Now we have two guides, Virgil and the as yet unnamed woman
who will take over after the first two realms. Why both? (As we shall
see, there is yet a third guide in the last three cantos of the poem, and
lesser guides and mentors along the way.) Virgil gives his answer in
the second canto.
The canto begins with an invocation of the Muses, indicat-
ing, as does the presence of Virgil, Dante’s blending of the classical
and the Christian. The fact that Virgil told the story of the found-
ing of Rome—the destiny of Aeneas chosen for him in the celestial
empyrean, that is, in heaven—and the fact that the Roman empire
was providentially the setting for Christianity, must explain Dante’s
choice of Virgil. That is, Virgil celebrated Rome, the city “u’ siede il
successor del maggior Piero”: “where the successor of the great Peter
sits” (Inf. 2.24), and to which Paul came as missionary.
The mention of Paul provides Dante with a way of expressing his
fear at the prospect Virgil has put before him. “Io non Enëa, io non
Paulo sono”: “I’m no Aeneas, I’m not Paul” (Inf. 2.32). To allay that
fear, Virgil tells why he has come to rescue Dante.
Io era tra color che son sospesi,

e donna mi chiamò beata e bella,
tal che di comandare io la richiesi.
Lucevan li occhi suoi più che la stella;
e cominciommi a dir soave e piana,
con angelica voce, in sua favella.
(Inf. 2.52–57)
I was among those who are suspended (in Limbo), where a lady
came to me so blessed and beautiful that I begged to obey her
command. Her eyes were brighter than the stars and she began to
speak to me with a sweet angelic voice.
Virgil thus presents himself as a volunteer as well; how could he

not wish to serve so fair and beautiful a woman who speaks in such
angelic tones? She begins with equal courtesy, telling the Mantuan
poet that his fame will endure as long as the world itself, and then
gives Virgil his commission.
L’amico mio, e non della ventura,

nella diserta piaggia è impedito
sì nel cammin, che volt’è per paura;

e temo che non sia già sì smarrito,
ch’io mi sia tardi al soccorso levata,
per quel ch’i’ ho di lui nel cielo udito.
(Inf. 2.61–66)
My friend not by chance is hindered on his way on a deserted

hillside and because of fear has been turned away; I fear that he
has already become so lost that I may be too late to help him,
or so I have heard of him in heaven.
The speaker identifies herself as Beatrice, and we have no trouble

identifying who her friend is from the opening of the previous canto.
If it had not occurred to us before, we now see the nature of Dante’s
perilous condition at the outset of the Commedia. The physical dan-
gers, the menacing beasts, point to a greater evil: that he has gone
so far astray that her help will come too late. All this she has heard
of him in heaven, she says, and then, in partial explanation of the
choice of Virgil, adds that poet can speak to poet persuasively. This
will console her, and she adds that only her love has led her to Limbo
from the place to which she longs to return. When she returns, she
promises Virgil to sing his praises to the Lord.
Is Beatrice, then, the principal cause of the journey that lies ahead,
the journey that has as its aim to rescue Dante from impending per-
dition and recall him to the right path? Beatrice tells Virgil that there
is another gentle lady who, although in heaven, weeps from distress
at Dante’s condition. That gentle lady turned to St. Lucy and told her
that her “faithful one” had need of her, whereupon Lucy came to Bea-
trice and wondered why she had not gone to Dante’s aid. This visit
from Lucy motivates Beatrice, of whom Lucy says that no one in the
world is more concerned for Dante’s welfare. Now here she is, braving
hell itself, in order to enlist Virgil’s help.
Thus, a hierarchy of three women stands behind the choice of
Virgil. Beatrice has been alerted—or reminded—by Lucy of the par-
lous condition into which the man who loves her has fallen. But Lucy,
too, has been prompted by another, who weeps because of the condi-
tion into which Dante and so many others have fallen:
Donna è gentil nel ciel che si compiange

di questo ’mpedimento . . .
(Inf. 2.94–95)
There is a gentle lady in heaven who weeps at this distress.
With this woman we come to the end of the chain. She, who is forever
nameless in hell (as is Christ), is of course the Blessed Virgin Mary,
introduced in terms of the compassion that she feels for poor sinners.
It is noteworthy that Mary is first introduced in the Comedy as
the compassionate one, as she who weeps at our distress. Celle qui
pleure—she who weeps—is the way Our Lady of La Salette is de-
scribed. Mary is the Mother of Mercy who longs for all to share in
the great happiness that has been won for them by her Son. It is also
important to note that she is not our sole mediator. She is only the
first among created mediators. There are also the saints, such as St.
Lucy, and Beatrice, whose invocation on our behalf is so important
in the economy of salvation. Mary describes Dante to Lucy as “your
faithful one,” indicating the devotion that Dante had to this martyr of
Syracuse who had become the patron of those with eye trouble (one
of Dante’s afflictions). But the heavenly scene put before us makes
clear that it is Mary, first and above all, who is moved by Dante’s dan-
gerous condition. The dark wood is clearly a metaphor for his sin-
ful condition, and Mary, moved to pity by his state, speaks to Lucy,
who in turn speaks to Beatrice. And Beatrice descends into hell and
speaks to Virgil. Mary, however, is at the beginning of Dante’s pilgrim
journey and the principal explanation for it.
Mary’s appearance may seem merely a cameo, a device to get the
action started, but nothing could be further from the truth. Mary’s
distress is communicated to Lucy and Beatrice, and in each case a
gentle chiding is involved. How could Lucy fail to notice the plight
of her faithful one? Lucy in turn asks Beatrice, How she could forget
the one who loved her so? Can she not hear his anguished cry as he
wars against the death that menaces him? This death is above all that
“second death” of those in hell. Lucy and Beatrice may have forgot-
ten Dante, but Mary has not, and out of pity she calls the others into
action.
For all that, Mary seems to drop out of the picture while Virgil
and Dante descend through the circle of hell to the lake of ice at the
center of the world, in which Lucifer is frozen. There is one other al-
lusion to her intercession on the way down, but, again, she is never
named in hell. That would be as unfitting as invoking the name of
Christ in hell. This is the realm where all hope has been abandoned. If
Dante is being led through it, it is because he needs this way to reach
his final destination. He needs a vivid reminder of the state of souls
after death and how their state is explained by the free acts they per-
formed while alive. It is a dramatic and moral lesson, meant to lead
him from the misery of sin to eternal happiness. And not just him, of
course. This singular Florentine poet stands for all of us, and Mary’s
concern for him embraces each of us. Only after Dante and Virgil,
having reached the frozen pit of hell and ascended through the oppo-
site hemisphere, “emerge to see again the stars” (Inf. 34.139) does the
role of Mary become central again, until, at the end of the Commedia,
her intercession gains for Dante a glimpse of the glory that awaits in
heaven.
THREE
The Seven Storey Mountain
Let us not think impiously

nor envy anyone
nor if struck in turn offend
but evil overcome with good.
Be absent from our hearts

wrath, envy and pride,
and away with avarice,
the root of every evil.
—Liturgia horarum (Liturgy of the Hours),
hebd 3, ad officium lectionis
Per una lagrimetta: Thanks to a little tear
In the second canto of the Purgatorio, the souls who disembark on

the island where the great mountain rises sing from Psalm 113(114),
“When Israel went out of Egypt,” and we are of course reminded of
the way in which Dante used its verses in the letter to Can Grande
to illustrate the senses of Scripture. The anagogical meaning was the
soul’s escape from this mortal world to paradise, and that is what we
35
see these souls engaged upon. First they must be purged of the stain
of the sins they committed, even though they have been forgiven
already. In fact, delay is a note struck early in the cantica, but not so
as to blur the great difference between this realm and the preceding
one. Hell is the realm of despair; Purgatory is the realm of hope. The
souls here are assured of their salvation and their eventual entry into
glory, and they are quite willing to suffer the delays that purgation
entails.
Souls are brought by boat from Ostia, etymologically located at
the mouth of the Tiber, where usually they find it difficult to book
passage and have to wait. At the moment, however, things have been
speeded up. This is due no doubt to the Jubilee Year, during which the
pope extended certain favors to the dead.
The continuing role of Dante’s tre donne, his three ladies, becomes
apparent. When Virgil, confronting a forbidding Cato, guardian of
Purgatory, explains their coming up from hell, he invokes Beatrice,
the lady who came from heaven to enlist him as a guide for Dante.
Cato is thereby placated. After the first night on the island, Dante
finds that he has been transported by Lucy up to the Gate of Peter,
where Purgatory proper begins. And Mary? Her role is the most im-
portant one, and we can watch it expand as we proceed.
There are two initial levels on the lower slopes of the island,
called ante-Purgatory, where souls must wait before they can begin
their purgation: the level of the excommunicated and the level of the
late repentant (of which there are three kinds, the indolent, the un-
shriven, and the preoccupied). Among the unshriven is Buonconte,
who was killed in the battle of Campaldino, a battle in which Dante
himself had fought. But how can an unshriven soul end in purga-
tory, with the assurance of heaven to sustain his hope? Buonconte
describes his final moment on earth for Dante:
Quivi perdei la vista e la parola;

nel nome di Maria fini’, e quivi
caddi, e rimasa la mia carne sola.
Io dirò vero, e tu ’l ridì tra ’ vivi:
l’angel di Dio mi prese, e quel d’inferno
gridava: “O tu del ciel, perché mi privi?
Tu te ne porti de costui l’etterno

per una lagrimetta che ’l mi toglie.
(Purg. 5.100–107)
There I lost sight and speech just as I uttered Mary’s name, then
fell, and only my flesh remained. I tell you truly and you tell it to
the living, the angel of God came for me and the angel of hell
complained, “O you of heaven, why do you deprive me? For just
one little tear you carry off his eternal part.”
Buonconte, though unshriven, died repentant with the name of

Mary on his lips. Tell my story, he urges Dante, and describe the rage
of the devil who came to claim me only to find that an angel had
snatched away his prey. O thief of heaven! The angel came in effect as
the messenger of Mary. We are made aware of the power and effica-
ciousness of the Mother of God. And this raises a problem. Does her
intervention make a mockery of the basic premise of the Comedy?
The allegorical meaning of the great poem is the way in which
human beings, by their free acts, justly merit punishment or reward.
But Buonconte’s single tear in ictu mortis, the murmuring of Mary’s
name, sweeps away a lifetime of freely chosen and awful deeds as if
they had never been. Deathbed conversions seem to make the way
one has lived inconsequential.
A first response to this would be to notice that Buonconte’s case
is that of most of us, not a rare exception. Sero te amavi, Augustine
laments: Late have I loved thee. Every conversion must seem to
come late and after deeds we would rather not remember. Of course,
those deeds leave their mark on the soul. Buonconte must mount all
seven levels of the mountain of Purgatory proper before his soul is
fit to see God. The words Ave, Maria will be heard increasingly as
the poem continues, and we may remember the second half of that
prayer as it developed: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sin-
ners, now and at the hour of our death.”1 It thus becomes a prayer for
a happy death. And who could not take comfort from Buonconte’s
near escape from the realm of despair?
Furthermore, late or even deathbed conversions do not negate
the assumptions of the poem. Every moral decision takes place in
an instant, we might say, however prolonged the reflection leading

up to it. The moment of choice is a moment, after all. And in the last
moments of life one is still capable of making a choice that defines
the state of one’s soul. Repentance makes the one who was estranged
from God by sin into God’s friend again. All that is true, but it in turn
may seem to trivialize Buonconte’s story. He himself is awed by what
happened, which is one reason he wants his story told. The other is
because his story can be a consolation to the living.
Beatrice may be the “open sesame” with Cato, Lucy may transport
Dante in a dream to Peter’s Gate, but by Mary’s intercession, souls
are saved. I don’t suggest that this is an exact division of labor. After
all, Lucy is a saint, and Dante has clearly canonized Beatrice—just as
in the Circle of the Sun in the Paradiso he anticipates the canoniza-
tions of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure. The last two are not the
most surprising additions to the calendar of the saints in that circle,
and the intercession of the saints is efficacious, but, as elsewhere in
the poem, these lesser intercessors are instruments of the Mother of
Mercy. When Virgil tells Dante of the limitations of the human intel-
lect in understanding the divine plan, he explains that if this were not
so, if all were clear to us now, “mestier non era parturir Maria”—it
would not have been necessary for Mary to give birth (Purg. 3.39).
This apparent aside draws our attention to the unique role Mary plays
in our salvation. She bore the Incarnate God by whose stripes we are
healed. Without the mother there would be no son, and without the
son, no salvation. No other mere creature plays so essential a role in
the great drama of salvation as Mary.
Philosophical Prelude to the Purgatorio
It is helpful to pause here and reflect further on the logic that under-
lies the Purgatorio, guided, as was Dante, by Thomas Aquinas. Our
appetites, as the word suggests, seek something. They pull us toward
their objects as the end they desire, and therefore they pull us toward
goods. The good is that which all things seek. This is indeed a com-
prehensive statement. Appetite and desire are not confined to human
agents. “Water seeks its own level” would not have been a metaphor
for Dante. The whole of creation and every creature in it is an expres-

sion of the goodness that is God. Creatures, we might say, have good-
ness in various degrees, but God is goodness. The whole of creation
tends toward him as its ultimate end.
Any action aims at some good, and a created good will always
be a particular good, not, needless to say, the sum total of goodness.
Water slakes thirst, bread hunger. The sense appetites thus bear on
particular goods—food, drink, the pleasure associated with the per-
formance of natural functions. In his disquisition on love in Purgato-
rio 17, Virgil distinguishes importantly between natural and rational
love: o naturale o d’animo (Purg. 17.93).
“Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly”—these exemplify what is meant
by natural love or desire, but “I gotta love one man till I die” does
not. We do not decide to want our hunger and thirst slaked; men do
not decide to be attracted to women, or women to men; it is not a
decision to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Such natural desires are the
infrastructure of human action. They become d’animo when a person
decides how, when, and what will slake her thirst, and of course how
much and how this will fit into her overall good. We get no credit
or blame for natural love or desire; but as moral agents we become
responsible, that is, answerable for our choices. A natural attraction
is consciously pursued. A man or woman does not marry just any
person who catches the wandering eye.
Humans are layered beings, and they are not the first creatures
in the cosmos. (Those are the angels.) The great universal for Dante
is love. It permeates the universe because it is at its origin. Creation
is the product of the divine love, and all creatures have some share in
the fullness of goodness that is God. God is the love that moves the
sun and other stars, and all the sublunary world as well. Creatures
embody a hierarchy of loves, from the fall of the stone, to water
seeking its own level, to the more complicated seeking involved in
the growth and nourishing of plants. The move from the inanimate
to the animate world (which is not coterminous with what Vir-
gil calls d’animo) is the move to the moral order. The simplest of
material beings have a single good that they seek; they are, in St.
Thomas’s phrase, determined to one object as their good. For liv-
ing things, “seeking good” becomes more complicated: a plant, for
example, grows up and down and reaches out in every direction,

enabling it to grow and flourish. (That is the natural habitat of the
word “flourishing”—flowering.) Seeking good is more indetermi-
nate with plants than with rocks and water. But already it is layered.
Plants, like rocks, can also be weighed, and they fall when dropped.
The “desires” that plants share with lesser things are not peculiar to
them, but they are there.
If the higher, vegetative level includes lower, less complicated
loves as well as what is distinctive of it, the lower level can be called
natural—and is—by contrast with the desires of living things. But the
distinctive activity of plants is natural, too, in the sense that it is not
chosen. The two levels in plants are also present in the next level, that
of animals. Like plants, they grow and take nourishment, but beasts
have an awareness that we would not attribute to plants (except, of
course, in fiction, as in the Roald Dahl story in which a man hears the
screaming of the grass as it is being mowed). Pursuit of the pleasur-
able and avoidance of harm manifests itself in increasingly compli-
cated ways as we move up the created hierarchy. When we come to
man, we are invited to see him as a microcosmos. We share desires
with lower realms of being, but we are beings whose distinctive love is
prompted by knowledge more comprehensive than that which guides
other animals’ actions.
We are aware of the freedom we have in our pursuit of the goods
we do not choose to want, goods such as food and drink. Call these
goods natural, and we grasp what Virgil means by d’animo. For the
human agent, the particular ends of natural desires are brought under
a comprehensive desire for the good—for goodness itself—and they
will be compared and then chosen in the light of their relation to our
overall good. The young man knocking at the brothel door is looking
for God. This initially startling remark by the novelist Bruce Marshall
nicely summarizes the human case.
Our choices bear on particular objects as we relate them to good-
ness as such. The human pursuit of food or drink or sex—objects our
appetites do not choose to want—is the conscious pursuit of those
particular goods, and the human task is to relate the love of such
things to our comprehensive good. However mistaken we may be in
judging that relation, our actions are always a pursuit of things under
the aegis of goodness. Particular goods are to be sought in relation

to goodness as such. The pathetic boy at the brothel door mistakenly
sees what he wants as related to that comprehensive good.
Even when we correctly seek a particular good in relation to the
comprehensive good, we become aware that it cannot completely as-
suage our desire. Augustine wrote in his Confessions, “You have made
us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in
thee.” Our awareness of ourselves and of the arena in which we act
lifts us above the irrational animals. Each of us is a microcosm, the
epitomization of the cosmos, whose distinctive capacities—intellect
and will—enable us consciously and freely to direct our lives. The
great message of the Comedy is that our free will makes us respon-
sible for ordering our deeds to the true good. We can succeed or fail.
But whether in success or failure, what draws us on is the good.
The Logic of Purgatory, Continued
Only after passing through ante-Purgatory (the location of the ex-

communicated and late repentant) and then ascending the first three
levels of the mountain proper, where souls are purged of the effects of
pride, envy, and anger, does Virgil explain to Dante the rationale of
this graded purgation.
“Né creator né creatura mai,”

cominciò el, “figliuol, fu sanza amore,
o naturale o d’animo; et tu ’l sai.
Lo naturale è sempre sanza errore,
Ma l’altro puote errar per malo obietto
o per troppo o per poco di vigore.
Mentre ch’elli è nel primo ben diretto,
e ne’ secondi sé stesso misura,
esser non può cagion di mal diletto;
ma quando al mal si torce, o con più cura
o con men che non dee corre nel bene,
contra ’l fattore adovra sua fattura.
(Purg. 17.91–102)
Son, he began, neither creator nor creature ever was without love,
either natural or of the soul, as you know. The natural is always
without error, but the other can err because of a bad object, or
because of too much or too little vigor. As long as the first is well
directed and tends to secondary goods within measure, it cannot be
cause of evil delight, but when it turns to evil or seeks the good with
too much or too little care, the creature acts against its Creator.
Fault can arise, then, either from pursuing evil or by excessive or de-
fective pursuit of the good. Virgil underscores the fact that love is the
source of all action, not only virtuous action. But if this is true, and if
love is of the good, how can there be bad action? The answer involves
the fact that evil is always parasitic on the good.
Among the things we are not free to love are, first, God, good-
ness itself; everything is loved sub ratione boni. Nor can we fail to love
ourselves. So what is left, to explain love twisted toward evil?
Resta, se dividendo bene stimo,

che ’l mal che s’ama è del prossimo; ed esso
amor nasce in tre modi in vostro limo.
(Purg. 17.112–114)
There remains, if I have distinguished well, the evil one wishes for
his neighbor, and this your clay gives birth to in three ways.
It is in relation to our neighbor that a threefold fault can enter in.

Here we are given the explanation of the first three levels proper of
Purgatory and the capital sins that define them. Sometimes we want
to excel and thereby wish our neighbor to be abased. Sometimes we
fear to lose honor or fame by our neighbor’s ascendancy, and thus
we wish him or her to fail. And sometimes this leads us to take ven-
geance against others whose good fortune threatens to excel our own.
In short, we can be guilty of pride, envy, or anger. The perverted love
involved in such sinful behavior is purged di sotto, below, that is, on
the first three levels of the mountain. Moreover, if we respond with
lukewarm love to the good we recognize, we are guilty of another sin,
sloth or acedia. This sin defines the fourth level, which serves as a
kind of divider of the mountain. Below it are sins that involve wishing
our neighbor harm; sloth itself is defective love of the good; and the
three upper levels are concerned with the effects of sins arising from
disordered love of the good. These are covetousness, gluttony, and
lust. Thus Dante has defined the capital sins in terms of the great
wellspring of action, love of the good.
Ciascun confusamente un bene apprende

nel qual si queti l’animo, e desira;
per che di giugner lui ciascun contende.
(Purg. 17.127–129)
Each one of us confusedly grasps the good in which the soul can
rest and desires it: thus all seek to reach that good.
Lo naturale è sempre sanza errore: The natural is never wrong
We are given this map of the second kingdom, or, more precisely,
a description and comparison of the seven levels or terraces of the
mountain, when Dante and Virgil are moving from the third to the
fourth terrace. And these terraces are divided into three groups. To
repeat, the first group comprises the first three terraces; the second
is a class with one member, the fourth terrace; and the third com-
prises the remaining three terraces. Reversing the ordering of the
Inferno, where Dante descended into more and more serious sins
and their punishments, the Purgatorio commences with the most
serious of the capital sins. Souls then ascend to the least serious sins.
One sign of this ordering is that Dante finds the ascent less fatiguing
as he travels higher on the mountain. What is the basis for the three
groupings?
The fundamental principle, as we have seen, is that every human
act is prompted by love of the good, and defective or sinful acts are
those involving a defective love of the good.
Quinci comprender puoi ch’esser convene

amor sementa in voi d’ogne virtute
e d’ogne operazion che merta pene.
(Purg. 17.103–105)
Thus you understand that love is the seed in you of every virtue
as well as of every act deserving of punishment.
Performing our distinctive act well is what is meant by virtue, and

performing it badly is vice.2 Our distinctive act is freely and con-
sciously to direct ourselves to the comprehensive good by means of
the particular goods we choose.
Does Dante think that we begin with a clear and developed no-
tion of the comprehensive good that draws us on? Hardly. He is an
Aristotelian who knows that human knowledge begins in generali-
ties, in a confused grasp, and only gradually attains clarity. Similarly,
Boethius in his colloquy with Dame Philosophy is told of this implicit
desire for happiness: “ ‘Whither?’ I asked. ‘To true happiness,’ she an-
swered, ‘of which your mind also dreams but cannot see it for what it
is because you are occupied with images.’ ”3 Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics finds in our natural and irrepressible desire for happiness our
ultimate end. But it remains to determine what precisely that happi-
ness is. Our pursuit of happiness does not await that clarification, of
course; rather, the clarification is demanded by the given universal
human desire for happiness, whatever it might be.
To the Manichean, some things are evil in themselves and others
are good in themselves, and moral good and evil simply await our
choices. Dante will have none of this. Our choices are always of some-
thing good. It is when we choose a good in a disordered way, that is,
not relating it to the good for which we are made, that our acts are
evil. Our sense appetites simply draw us to goods—food, drink, and
sex are goods—but because of reason and will, we are not the toys of
our sense appetites. “If sex were all then every trembling hand could
make us squeak, like dolls, the wished for words,” wrote Wallace
Stevens.4 We are drawn to but not compelled by sensible goods. Vir-
gil explains the layout of Purgatory that we have been paraphrasing
against this background.
The movement of will toward our grasp of the good is natural,
not free. Nor do we need instruction in order to seek our own good.
Nor, says Virgil, can we as creatures think ourselves sufficient unto
ourselves, divorced from God. We cannot hate the source of the fact
that we exist and are what we are. In that sense, love of God is natural
to us. So again, how do we go wrong? If we cannot hate ourselves or

God, we can still wish harm to our neighbor. When we see our neigh-
bor’s greatness as a threat to and detraction from our own, and want
to suppress him, we are guilty of pride. My excellence, my flourishing,
and my good are taken to be diminished by the excellence, flourish-
ing, and good of my neighbor as subtracting from my own. In a disor-
dered pursuit of my own good, I wish harm to my neighbor and want
him brought low so that my height might thereby be increased. Pride
is the source of all other moral evils. That is why it comes first and is
expiated on the first terrace of Purgatory.
è chi podere, grazia, onore e fama

teme di perder perch’ altri sormonti,
onde s’attrista sì che ’l contrario ama;
(Purg. 17.118–120)
And there is he who fears to lose favor, honor and fame because
another surpasses him, grieves and loves the contrary.
Envy arises out of pride. We are saddened when others rise above
us in excellence, fearing that we are thereby losing our own “fame,
favor and honor.” The envious brood over and are made gloomy by
the success of others.
ed è chi per ingiuria par ch’aonti,

sì che si fa de la vendetta ghiotto,
e tal convien che ’l male altrui impronti.
(Purg. 17.121–123)
And there is he who feels himself so degraded by insult that he

becomes greedy for vengeance; such a one must crave another’s harm.
Thus, in the logic of vice, pride begets envy and envy begets wrath.
And so, being purged of pride, souls find the next purgation easier,
and the next easier still.
This disquisition of Virgil, remember, takes place after he has ac-
companied Dante up the first three levels of Purgatory, which involve
triforme amor, three forms of disordered love. Thus far, it is a retro-

spective. In the next canto Dante begs Virgil to continue. What is this
love by which you explain both virtue and vice?
Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, in her introduction to and notes
on canto 18 of the Purgatorio, stresses the peculiar personal impor-
tance of the continuing discussion for Dante. His poetic mentors, and
indeed Dante as well, have described love as a fatality, as something
that comes and simply overwhelms the person. The phrase “falling in
love” retains something of this conception. But if love conquers all,
in Ovid’s famous phrase, how can we be free? Dante is about to reject
the theory of love that had animated so much of his earlier poetry.
If we are helpless before the assault of love—this was Francesca’s at-
tempted self-exculpation in the Inferno—how can we be praised or
blamed? In reply, Virgil explains the logic further.
The first movement of the will toward an object, like that of intel-
lect, is natural and thus not free. The mind grasps an object, and the
will desires the good. But to choose this good or that is not deter-
mined. In that respect we are free, and it is in the pursuit of particular
goods that we fare well or ill morally. We are not determined to a
disordered pursuit of goods, that is, a pursuit that does not relate par-
ticular goods to the ultimate good. Nor is it necessary that we pursue
them in an ordered way. To choose is our essential moral task.
Of course, there is something in the notion that we fall in love
and that there are fatal, or better fateful, attractions of one person to
another. Wasn’t it Pascal who said that all that was needed to alter the
course of history was to add an inch to Cleopatra’s nose? Accidents
of feature and gesture first attract us, and the pulse quickens. Are we
helpless, then? Was it kismet that we met and kissed? Lovers love to
think so. Nor is it fanciful to think that our beloved was meant for
us, and vice versa. But there must be acquiescence or rejection of this
passionate response. We are, with whatever difficulty, free to pursue
or not to pursue. Lovers at the altar give free consent to the attrac-
tions that brought them there. Despite all the lyrics of a thousand
ballads, we are not slaves of love. Human love is a free act and may be
virtuous or not.
Dante will return to the topics of love and free will in the Paradiso,
when the question of predestination arises. But Virgil’s explanation
here will be sufficient for us to mount the terraces of Purgatory with

Dante and eventually to see how the Blessed Virgin is the examplar of
the virtues opposed to the capital sins.
Io dico d’Aristotele e di Plato: I speak of Plato and Aristotle
The role of Virgil and the fact that Cato, another pagan Roman, is the
guardian of Purgatory bring back another matter that becomes clari-
fied in this second cantica of the great poem.
Earlier, in speaking of a natural happiness, namely, an imperfect
realization of the ultimate end of which men are capable, we saw that
the ethical considerations that surround this topic are subsumed by
the supernatural. People do not cease being human when they be-
lieve in the divine; their belief rides on and is affected by their natural
activities—and vice versa, of course. Beatrice came to Limbo to enlist
the help of Virgil, and when Virgil guides Dante to the first level of
the Inferno, he meets the great poets and sages of antiquity. Its oc-
cupants are good in the way humans can become good by their own
efforts, by possessing the natural virtues. In canto 3 of the Purgatorio,
Virgil alludes to his companions in Limbo as great souls who thirsted
in vain:
e disïar vedeste sanza frutto

tai che sarebbe lor disio quetato,
ch’etternalmente è dato lor per lutto:
io dico d’Aristotile e di Plato
e di molt’altri . . .
(Purg. 3.40–44)
You saw the fruitless desire of those who would have their desire
fulfilled but whose desire eternally laments; I speak of Aristotle
and Plato and of many others.
What the pagan philosophers could not know of during their life-
times, now, in eternity, is a source of pain. What might have been, but
alas was nor for them. Having mentioned them, and there are many
like them, Virgil bows his head e rimase turbato, troubled. The reader
too is troubled.
That the good pagans are without fault is explicitly stated in his
own case by Virgil in canto 7. Speaking to Sordello, he remarks, “I
am Virgil, who failed to get to heaven only because I did not have
the faith” (Purg. 7.7–8). But although Limbo is not a punishment for
personal fault, it is an acknowledgment of the great divide between
those who have accepted the grace of Christ and those who have not.
The case of those who lived before they could have made the choice
is particularly poignant. As discussed in chapter 1, because the good
pagans in the afterlife become aware of their eternal separation from
the supernatural order, from the vision of God that is the reward of
believers, they could hardly be presented as joyful.
This points to the enormous difference between, on the one hand,
morality or ethics—philosophical or natural accounts of how life
should be led—and, on the other hand, Christian revelation. The In-
ferno, it is often pointed out, seems structured on the Nicomachean
Ethics of Aristotle. Indeed, Virgil himself makes this clear in canto 11
of the Inferno when he explains the layout of the lower world to Dante.
As they descend into ever more heinous sins, the levels are inconti-
nence, violence, and malice. At the first level they encounter the lustful
sinners, indelibly represented by Paolo and Francesca. These two are
perhaps the most commented on characters in the great poem, and we
may be puzzled by their attractiveness. Illicit, adulterous lovers, caught
in the act, they were dispatched before they could repent and must
drift through eternity in an endless embrace. As Francesca recounts,
the reading of the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere first stirred their
imaginations and then their desire. (What we read affects our actions.)
An eternal embrace might not seem much of a hell for lovers, but what
they sought in one another cannot be found there. Their wills were
made for God, goodness itself, who alone can assuage their desire.
We are likely to imagine that this example of Dante’s is a little
harsh. We tend to think in these days that sins of the flesh are scarcely
worth calling sins. Dante would allow only that other mortal sins are
worse. The lower the depth of hell, the worse the sin, and the worse
the sin, the more gradations of it Dante brings to our attention.
If the hierarchy of sins is based on Aristotle, on philosophical

ethics, then the arrangement of Purgatory brings home to us the es-
sential difference between Christianity and natural morality. At the
outset of the Purgatorio, Cato is described as reflecting the light of
four stars. Scholars tell us that these represent the four cardinal vir-
tues: temperance, fortitude, justice, and prudence. Later those stars
will fade and three others take their place, representing the theologi-
cal virtues: faith, hope, and charity. If Aristotle’s Ethics may be taken
as a reliable indication of what unaided human reason can discover
about how we should live our lives, where should one go for a sketch
of Christian morality? The answer is, of course, to the Sermon on the
Mount in Matthew 5–7.
Jesus begins his sermon with the beatitudes. One cannot think
of a more dramatic way of showing that the New Law is not the Old
Law, nor is it simply a repetition of the teaching of philosophers. The
beatitudes fly in the face of our natural assumptions about human life.
There have been philosophers who reject Christ’s claim to be the
Son of God, yet want to retain the “ethics of Jesus” as defensible within
the limits of reason alone. Their suggestion is that the Sermon on the
Mount contains only what we would naturally recognize as reason-
able guidance. This seems nonsense. As a practical matter, many find
belief in the Incarnation much easier than acceptance of the advice
that they should love their enemy, for example. Far from being a dis-
tillation of natural moral wisdom, the Sermon on the Mount seems
to stand natural wisdom on its head.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth.
Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after justice, for they shall be
satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.
Blessed are they who suffer persecution for justice’s sake, for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven. (Matt. 5:3–10)
Centuries of Christianity have made this list familiar, and some phi-
losophers, forgetful of the context in which the beatitudes were given
us, mistakenly have thought that this sermon is just what any good
philosopher could say. I challenge them to name one, I mean, one
speaking purely as a philosopher. To assert that our happiness is to
be found in poverty of spirit, in meekness, in mourning, and in suf-
fering persecution is scarcely to state the self-evident. It goes against
the grain of our natural being. Not only would we not have natu-
rally hit upon these guidelines for conduct, but we cannot possibly
incorporate them into our lives by our own power. For this, grace is
necessary—the abundance of God’s generosity, the gratuitousness (to
be redundant) of this elevation of sinful man to an end undreamt of
by philosophers and incommensurate with our human nature. O felix
culpa, St. Augustine said of original sin: Oh happy fault, meaning that
the remedy for the Fall was an elevation to a condition higher than
that lost by Adam’s sin. Everyone in Purgatory knows that he or she
got there by the grace of God and in no other way. And Mary is the
mother of grace. No wonder the souls there chant “Salve, Regina”
(Purg. 7.82).
St. Thomas on the Beatitudes
Like many other doctors of the Church, Thomas Aquinas commented

on the chapters of Matthew that have come to be known as the Ser-
mon on the Mount. Calling it a sermon may suggest that Jesus was
preaching to a large crowd, but in Matthew, according to Thomas, that
was not the case. He went up onto the mountain and, when he had
sat down, his disciples joined him and “opening his mouth, he taught
them.” Thomas ponders the fact that Jesus sat. When he preached, he
stood; this is a more intimate scene, and the sitting suggests the Lord’s
humility, already embodied in the fact that He is God become man.
By thus lowering himself, he becomes more accessible to us, as he
cannot be in the majesty of his divinity. Jesus’s being seated reminds
Thomas of the master before his class, where being seated is a matter
of professorial dignity: “Quiet is needed for the study of wisdom.”5
Jesus’s disciples came to him not only in body but in soul. “Opening
his mouth” suggests to Thomas that Jesus had been silent for a long
time. With Augustine, he sees this as indicating that the sermon will
be both deep and long.
A problem arises for the exegete in the fact that these chapters
in Matthew have a parallel in Luke (6:20ff.), and the two passages
seem to differ, not least in the fact that in Luke, Jesus is clearly speak-
ing to a great crowd of people; and Luke’s account is much shorter
than in Matthew, only part of a chapter. Thomas recalls the two so-
lutions proposed by Augustine. The first is that these passages tell
of two different occasions; Jesus first taught his disciples and then,
after coming down from the mountain, found a crowd waiting and
recapitulated the sermon for them. The second solution is that the
mountain in question had “a level stretch” lower down, and it was to
this that Jesus descended and found the crowd. Thomas prefers this
second solution. When Jesus withdrew and his disciples joined him,
he selected the twelve apostles from them, as Luke recounts, taught
them first, then went down to teach the crowd. This accords with the
end of the account in Matthew. “And it came to pass when Jesus had
finished these words, that the crowds were astonished at his teach-
ing” (Matt. 7:28–29).
A commentary that dwells in such detail on the opening verse
promises to be, and is, a lengthy one. Moreover, it is typical of the
biblical exegesis with which Dante would have been familiar: close
reading of the text, reference to other scriptural passages that throw
light on it, and the invocation of earlier commentaries, with particu-
lar reference to the fathers of the early Church.
Augustine wrote that the whole perfection of our life is contained
in the beatitudes; thus Jesus stresses the end to which the teaching
leads. That end is happiness, and, as Thomas notes, “happiness (be-
atitude) is what man chiefly desires.”6 So the Lord does three things
here: he sets forth the prize to be won; formulates the precepts that
direct us to it; and finally tells us how we can come to observe these
precepts.
But people are not of one mind as to what happiness is, how-
ever true it is that they all desire it. Thomas lists four different under-
standings of the term. Some seek happiness in external goods; others
seek happiness as the satisfaction of their will, in power; others seek
happiness in the practice of the virtues of the active life; and finally
others, like Aristotle, seek happiness in the contemplation of the di-
vine. So which is the right view? They are all false, Thomas says, al-
though not in the same way. Nonetheless, the Lord rejects them all.7
These four candidates for the meaning of human happiness are
familiar ones, and we would expect Thomas to commend the fourth,
namely, contemplation of the divine. This expectation is bolstered by
his attributing it to Aristotle. That fourth view is as satisfying an ac-
count as we can expect from the philosopher—and Thomas tells us
that Jesus rejects it (reprobat). The rejection is to be found in the be-
atitudes themselves.
The first conception of happiness, that it lies in external goods, is
countered by “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” The second, the imposi-
tion of one’s will on others, is countered by “Blessed are the merciful.”
And because men have several appetites, each must be addressed.
The irascible appetite leads to the desire for vengeance, and this is
countered by “Blessed are the meek.” The concupiscible appetite aims
at joy and pleasure, and this is countered by “Blessed are they who
mourn.” Finally, there is the will, which is twofold in that it seeks two
things: first, that it be constrained by no higher law; second, that it
may make subjects of others. That is, the will wants to excel and sub-
due, and the Lord teaches the opposite. “Blessed are they who hunger
and thirst after justice” is the rejection of the first, and “Blessed are
the merciful” again is the rejection of the second.
The third conception of happiness placed it in the practice of the
virtues of the active life; this is a mistake, Thomas claims, but less
so than the preceding accounts, because the active life is the via ad
beatitudinem. And that is why the Lord does not reject it as evil but
stresses that it is a way to happiness. How so? Such a virtue as tem-
perance has for its end the agent, the “cleansing of the heart,” since it
enables him or her to conquer passions. Other virtues are aimed at
other people, and their end is peace: opus iustitiae est pax. That is the
point of “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God” and
“Blessed are the peacemakers.”
As for the view that happiness consists in contemplation of
the divine, Thomas holds that the Lord rejects it as an end that we
could achieve in our earthly, temporal lives, but otherwise it is true;
happiness does consist in contemplation of the most intelligible ob-

ject, namely, God—“for they shall see God.” That is the end to which
all precepts point; that is the end to which we are called, and this
makes the fourth account of happiness inadequate. But that account
is as far as philosophy can take us. Moral virtues such as temper-
ance and justice have a higher telos than any mere philosopher could
imagine. And this has the consequence, since such happiness is above
our nature, that the acquired virtues, those of which Aristotle speaks,
must be complemented by what Thomas calls the infused virtues
(virtues given us by divine grace) as well as by the three theological
virtues.
Thomas underscores the novelty of this teaching by contrasting
it with the Old Law, which promised happiness on this earth, in joy
and song, whereas the New Law speaks of mourning as blessed. And
the chief object of mourning is the death of loved ones. The mourner
receives no consolation for his loss, and the Lord asks that we live our
lives in mourning. If we mourn bodily death, all the more should we
mourn spiritual death; it is for sin that we should mourn, and this
entails making satisfaction for having committed it. The follower of
Christ turns away from the pleasures recommended by the world.
This Christian mourning receives consolation: spiritual and eternal
goods and the love of God, rather than temporal and passing ones.
Thomas discusses the Sermon on the Mount in great detail, but
this brief paraphrase gives the flavor of his exegesis and shows how
Jesus’s teaching surpasses and goes against mere philosophical teach-
ing. It is the plain rejection of the first two views of our happiness,
which locate it in pleasure and power. The third and fourth views,
inadequate in themselves, are also to that degree false—the practice
of the virtues of the active life and such contemplation of the divine
as the philosopher attains can never fulfill our heart’s desire. But the
practice of the moral virtues is a condition for the pursuit of hap-
piness in the sense of contemplation, and the contemplation of the
philosopher is an imperfect realization of the notion of ultimate end.
It is contrasted, as we have seen, with the perfect realization, and that
is to see God as He is, to be joined to Him in love. It was no defect
in a philosopher such as Aristotle that he did not locate happiness
in the beatific vision. Nothing he could know about human nature
would suggest such an incommensurable object of our desires. The

Christian believer is able to see the inadequacy of contemplation in
the philosophical sense, not as a philosophical inadequacy but rather
as falling short of what Jesus promises: “they shall see God.” This
does not render philosophical discussions pointless; far from it. But
Dante, like St. Thomas, will always relate natural truths to the super-
natural; only then can they be of real interest to the Christian. For
the believer, the full and adequate account of human happiness is
contained in the beatitudes. Anything less is—less; and the more is a
matter of grace.
St. Thomas on the Capital Sins
The seven levels of Mount Purgatory represent the seven capital sins,
from the effects of which souls must be purged before they are ready
to enter paradise. For each of the capital sins there is an opposite vir-
tue, and as we ascend the mountain we find that some event in the life
of the Blessed Virgin is recalled in order to illustrate each of those vir-
tues. But first, Thomas’s account of the capital sins deserves mention.
For Thomas, to seek an end is to avoid its opposite, as the desire
for food is the avoidance of or flight from hunger. All the capital sins
involve a rationale for pursuit and avoidance, and the capital sins are
distinguished insofar as there are distinctively different pursuits and
avoidance. The good is what, by definition, attracts; thus, if the will
avoids a good, this must be because of the way that good is regarded.
After these prefatory remarks, in his Disputed Questions on Evil (De
malo), Thomas does what we have learned to expect from him. There
is a long tradition of Christian discussion of the capital sins, and he
is aware of it. He is particularly indebted to the account of Gregory
the Great. But Thomas further gives us what might almost be called a
deduction of the capital sins.8
Thomas begins by discussing the term “capital” as it is used here.
There are capital offenses, of course, but capital sins are so called
because they are the source of other subsidiary sins. According to
Thomas, there are four ways in which a sin can give rise to other sins,
and he settles on the last for his definition:
There is a fourth way in which one sin can cause another, because of its
end, insofar as a man commits one sin for the sake of the end of another
sin, as avarice causes fraud. In this way one sin is caused by another
actually and formally; and it is because of this mode of origin that they
are called capital vices. (De malo, q. 8, a. 1, c)
That a sin can be ordered to the end of another sin can arise on the
side of the sinner, who may be more prone to the one end than the
other. More than this is meant by a capital sin, however. When the end
of one sin is related to the end of another in such a way that, by and
large, the one leads to the other, the first is the capital sin. Thus, the
aim of fraud is deception, but fraud is aimed at monetary gain, the end
of avarice. That is why avarice is called a capital vice or sin.
This requires that capital sins have ends desirable in themselves,
to which the ends of the other vices can be ordered. Notice, Thomas
goes on, that one pursues a good and flees the opposed evil, as the
glutton seeks pleasure in food and flees the distress caused by the ab-
sence of food. So it is with the other vices. Capital sins can be fittingly
distinguished according to the difference of good and evil, such that
wherever there is a special reason for pursuit or avoidance, there we
will find a distinct capital sin. By “good” we mean that which attracts
appetite, so that if appetite avoids some good, it is because of some
aspect of this good.
Man has a threefold good, namely, the good of the soul, the good of the
body, and the good of external things. Pride or Vainglory is ordered
to the good of the soul, which is a good of which we form an image,
namely, the excellence of honor and glory. As for the good of the body
pertaining to the preservation of the individual, food, Gluttony is or-
dered to it. The corporeal good that pertains to the conservation of the
species as this involves the venereal is the concern of Lust. Avarice per-
tains to external goods. (De malo, q. 8, a. 1, c)
That gives us four capital sins. There are three more:
One retreats from the good insofar as it is an impediment to some good

inordinately desired, and to such an impeding good, appetite moves in
two ways, either by fleeing it or by rising in rebellion against it. Two

capital sins arise from fleeing the good, depending on whether the im-
peding good is considered in itself or in another; in itself, as when a
spiritual good impedes bodily rest or pleasure, and this is Acedia; in
another, when the god of another impedes one’s own excellence, and
this is Envy, which is sadness at another’s good; Wrath is the rising up
against the good. (Ibid.)
The capital sins are distributed by Dante on the terraces of the

Purgatorio in this ascending order: pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice,
gluttony, and lust. Furthermore, as we have seen, the first three form
a group, as do the last three, with sloth or acedia located between the
two groups. Are Thomas and Dante at odds here? One could say that
Thomas provides us with a theoretical basis for the distinct capital
sins, each of which gives rise to other sins (for example, the vices
derived from pride), while the arrangement of the Purgatorio stresses
the relations between the capital sins themselves. The root of them
all is pride, which disposes to envy and anger; one is reminded of the
Sartrean mot, “Hell is other people.”9 There is no division of opinion
between Thomas and Dante as to the ordering of the capital sins that
we find in the Purgatorio.
Mary and the Capital Sins
After ante-Purgatory, Dante and Virgil begin their laborious climb of

the mountain, a climb that will become progressively less laborious as
they ascend. The strains of “Salve, Regina,” sung by the late repentant,
come to them from below as they climb. Monks sang this antiphon
each night after Compline as they went to their cells:
Salve, Regina, Mater misericordiae;

vita, dulcedo et spes nostra, salve.
Ad te clamamus, exsules filii Evae.
Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes
in hac lacrimarum valle.
Eia ergo, advocata nostra,
illos tuos misericordes oculos

ad nos converte.
Et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui,
nobis, post hoc exsilium ostende.
O clemens, o pia, o dulcis Virgo Maria.
Hail holy Queen, mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our
hope. To you do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To you do
we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.
Turn then, most gracious advocate, your eyes of mercy toward us,
and after this exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb Jesus.
O clement, O loving, O sweet virgin Mary.
Now night falls and all activity on the mountain ceases, so Dante
sleeps. When he awakes, in canto 9, he finds that he has been carried
in his sleep up to the gate of Purgatory; three steps lead to it, repre-
senting confession, contrition, and reparation.
The gatekeeper, reassured by the information that St. Lucy has
sent them, invites Dante to climb those three steps. That done, he
traces seven P’s on Dante’s forehead. The letter P is for peccatum, sin,
and the seven letters stand for the seven capital sins. The steps leading
to the gate are of different colors, suggestive of confession, contri-
tion, and reparation; the gate itself is set on rock, the rock of Peter on
whom Christ has built his church. It opens, providing a narrow way
through, then shuts noisily behind Virgil and Dante. And then the
strains of “Te Deum laudamus” (Purg. 9.141) are heard.
Eight cantos were devoted to ante-Purgatory, nearly a fourth of
the cantica. Seven levels or terraces rise before Dante, each represent-
ing a capital sin, beginning with the most serious, pride, and ending
with the least serious, lust. A walkway encircles the mountain, ris-
ing as it does from level to level. Opposing each capital sin is one of
the beatitudes—Dante has need of only seven. The penitent endures
a particular penalty or punishment on each level and is instructed
not only by the relevant beatitude but, most importantly for our pur-
poses, by examples of the virtue opposed to the vice being expiated.
And on every level, and in the first place, the example of the virtue is
drawn from the life of the Blessed Virgin.
Dante may have been influenced here by the Speculum Beatae

Mariae Virginis, a medieval work attributed in his time to St. Bona
venture. Lectio 15 of the Speculum discusses the thesis, “That Mary is
blessed with seven virtues opposed to the capital vices.” The author
is commenting on the angelic salutation, “Blessed art thou amongst
women.” Virtue makes one blessed or happy, and “Mary is blessed
for her humility, which is opposed to pride; for her charity, which is
opposed to envy; for her meekness, which is opposed to wrath; for
her promptness, which is opposed to sloth; for her liberality, which
is opposed to avarice; for her sobriety, which is opposed to gluttony;
and for her chastity, which is opposed to lust.”10 Mary is thus a com-
pendium of the Christian virtues, the highest created model.
The similarity between Dante’s Purgatorio and this allegedly Bona
venturian work11 is striking, but so are the differences. Dante, as we
will see, always relies on the New Testament in calling attention to the
appropriate virtue in the Blessed Virgin. Speculum Beatae Mariae Vir-
ginis always illustrates the virtue of Mary by finding it in some figure
from the Old Testament who prefigures Mary. Speaking of her humil-
ity, for example, the Speculum author cites Psalm 118(119):21 and Isaiah
4 and then finds in Axa, in the Book of Judges, a figure of Mary.12
In discussing Mary’s charity, he appeals to Sarah; in discussing her
promptness, which is opposed to sloth, he cites Genesis. The Speculum
continues in this vein, relying on the Old Testament and the prefigur-
ing of Mary in Old Testament women for an understanding of Mary’s
virtues. It is otherwise in the Purgatorio. What is common to the two
treatments is that Mary is the embodiment of the virtues opposed to
the seven capital sins. The difference lies in the scriptural examples.
Dante bases his presentation of Mary as the exemplar of each of
the virtues opposed to the capital sins on the following biblical texts:
1. Luke 1:38 – humility as opposed to pride (Purg. 10.34–45)

2. John 2:1–11 – mercy or generosity as opposed to envy (Purg. 13.28–30)
3. Luke 2:41–46 – meekness as opposed to anger (Purg. 15.85–92)
4. Luke 1:39 – zeal as opposed to sloth (Purg. 18.97–100)
5. Luke 2:7 – poverty as opposed to avarice (Purg. 20.19–24)
6. John 2:1–11 – temperance as opposed to gluttony (Purg. 22.142–144)
7. Luke 1:34 – chastity as opposed to lust (Purg. 25.127–128)
Nel ciel dell’umiltà ov’è Maria: In the heaven of humility where Mary is
Dante and his guide find themselves on a narrow pathway wind-

ing round the mountain and without a guard rail. On this first level,
where the sin of pride is expiated, they immediately come upon ex-
amples of humility, the virtue opposed to pride. Engraved in stone at
their feet are figures so vivid that it is as if they can be heard as well
as seen. The first example of humility is Mary, the Mother of Jesus,
and the episode in her life chosen to convey this is the Annunciation.
The Annunciation, that fateful moment when the angel Gabriel
came to Mary and greeted her with the salutation, “Hail Mary, full of
grace, the Lord is with thee,” is surely Dante’s favorite scene. He came
by it honestly, so to speak, for the Annunciation was a favorite subject
of artists and painters, and Dante’s theological guides—St. Bernard,
St. Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas—loved to dwell on this scene
and to draw from it all they could.
Bernard, for example, remarks on the specificity of the scene, the
names and the place given. “Now in the sixth month the angel Ga-
briel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a vir-
gin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the House of David, and the
virgin’s name was Mary” (Luke 1:26–28). The sixth month of what?
Of her cousin Elizabeth’s pregnancy, of which we have just read in
Luke. The rest of the passage imparts the full weight of history to this
moment. It is God who sends his angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary,
who is betrothed to Joseph of the House of David. This links Mary to
the whole history of Israel, the long preparation of the Jewish people
for this moment when salvation is at hand. That history is present in
its entirety to God. He has been guiding its temporal unfolding all
along. The free acts of men and women, performed for purposes of
their own and intelligible to them in the short term, become part of
the divine plan to save his people. What God has planned cannot not
come about, and yet he works through the free actions of men. This
is a great mystery, one that has prompted the fruitful meditation of
the Church fathers and theologians. Are our acts free or determined?
They are free, but for all that they play a part in God’s predestined
plan. From all eternity Mary was chosen for this singular role, to
be the mother of the Incarnate God, but she must freely accept her
role. “When she had heard him she was troubled at his word, and
kept pondering what manner of greeting this might be” (Luke 1:29).
Gabriel understands. “Do not be afraid, Mary, for thou hast found
grace with God. Behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb and shalt
bring forth a son: and thou shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great,
and shall be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will
give him the throne of David his father, and he shall be king over the
house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end”
(Luke 1:30–33).
Again, Luke reminds us of the genealogy of Mary and of her son
to be. The long history of the human race has been gathering to this
moment; this simple virgin at prayer is the means God has chosen
from all eternity to save His people. He will come among us as one
of us, human as well as divine, and for that he needs a mother. The
scene could well have been the occasion to call attention to the way
in which God humbles himself in the Incarnation. Who could be
more humble than Jesus, who “though he was by nature God, did
not consider being equal to God a thing to be clung to, but emptied
himself, taking the nature of a slave and being made like unto men.
And appearing in the form of man, he humbled himself, becoming
obedient to death, even to death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6–8). The mother
of such a son must herself be humble. “But Mary said to the angel,
“How shall this happen, since I do not know man?” (Luke 1:34). Is
this hesitation? Mary has to know to what she is giving her assent. She
must take on her predestined role freely and consciously. To call her
a virgin is not simply to note that she is intacta. According to long-
standing Christian tradition, from this point on, if not before, she is
a virgin by choice in order to more completely devote herself to God.
Is that vow to be set aside?13
“And the angel answered and said to her, ‘The Holy Spirit shall
come upon thee and the power of the Most High shall overshadow
thee; and therefore the Holy One to be born shall be called the Son of
God’ ” (Luke 1:35). Mary will conceive in a miraculous way; her spouse
will be the Holy Spirit, so her child will indeed be the Son of God.
There are angels and angels. The one who has come to Mary, in
Christian tradition, is an archangel, in the highest tier of the hierar-
chy of angels. But even if we came down the angelic hierarchy to the
least of angels, and there must be a least, we are still dealing with a
creature whose natural perfection surpasses that of any human being
to an unimaginable degree. An angel is a pure spirit. Its existence is
not measured by time; its knowledge is infused into it, not gathered
from experience. Thomas Aquinas structures the angelic hierarchy
in terms of the number of ideas each angel needs in order to know
what it knows. The more ideas required, the less perfect the angel
and the more its knowledge approaches ours, so to speak; our ideas
are formed on the basis of sense experience, wresting the natures
of things from their singular circumstances. This abstracting takes
time, based as it is on experience, and our thinking is sequential.
Truths bring to light other truths. Call our knowledge discursive.
But even the lowest angel knows with intuitive simplicity, compared
to human knowledge. The gap between men and angels is all but in-
finite, though there is an analogy between them. And the Archangel
Gabriel has been sent as a messenger to this virgin, scarcely more
than a girl, inviting an assent on which the whole future of the world
depends.
With angels as well as humans, we must distinguish the natural
from the supernatural order. The Annunciation is the moment when
the whole natural order is stood on its head. A simple little girl is
to become the Mother of God and thereby first among all creatures
in the supernatural order. However more perfect than Mary Gabriel
naturally is, from the supernatural point of view she will become his
queen. How could artists, poets, and theologians not ponder this
scene and seek to draw from it all that it contains? “But Mary said,
‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy
word.’ And the angel departed from her” (Luke 1:38). There it is, the
hinge of the history of salvation which turns on the fiat of Mary.
Dante, seeing that scene inscribed in stone, hears, as it were, Mary’s
answer. “Ecce ancilla Domini,” behold the handmaid of the Lord.
esser di marmo candido e addorno

d’intagli sì, che non pur Policleto,
ma la natura lì avrebbe scorno.
L’angel che venne in terra col decreto
de la molt’ anni lagrimata pace,
ch’aperse il ciel del suo lungo divieto,

dinanzi a noi pareva sì verace
quivi intagliato in an atto soave
che non sembiava imagine che tace.
Giurato si saria ch’el dicesse ‘Ave!’;
perché iv’ era imaginata quella
ch’ad aprir l’alto amor volse la chiave;
e avea in atto impressa esta favella
‘Ecce ancilla Deï’, propriamente
come figura in cera si suggella.
(Purg. 10.31–45)
There in white marble, adorned with carvings beyond the skill not
only of Polycletus but of nature too, the angel who brought to earth
the decree of the peace tearfully longed for during all those years and
which opened the heavens so long closed, appeared before us, so truly
graven there in gracious attitude that it seemed an image that could
speak. One would have sworn that he said, “Ave!” for there was
imaged too she who turned the key that opened supreme love, and
her whole attitude expressed these words, “Behold the handmaid of
the Lord,” as clearly as an image pressed in wax.
In humility the soul is emptied of all desires except to serve the

will of God. Before His will, one becomes as nothing. The example of
Mary etched in stone is followed by two others: David dancing before
the ark and the Emperor Trajan. In the example from the Old Testa-
ment, the psalmist David is Mary’s ancestor and thus the ancestor of
Christ, but the other is taken from secular history. How could a pagan
emperor exemplify the Christian virtue of humility that is opposed to
pride? The scene depicted in stone focuses on a poor widow, who is
humbly begging a favor from Trajan. According to a story in the Mid-
dle Ages, St. Gregory brought the dead Roman emperor back from
hell and baptized him. We will meet Trajan again in the Paradiso.
The action on this terrace has so far concentrated on humility as
the remedy for pride. That remedy is given pride of place. Now, hav-
ing had the opportunity to ponder the scenes etched in stone, Virgil
draws Dante’s attention to an approaching throng. We are about to
meet the proud who are atoning for their sin. Dante adopts an openly
hortatory tone:
Non vo’ però, lettor, che tu ti smaghi

di buon proponimento per udire
come Dio vuol che ’l debito si paghi.
Non attender la forma del martìre:
pensa la succession; pensa ch’al peggio
oltre la gran sentenza non può ire.
(Purg. 10.106–111)
Reader, I would not weaken your resolve on hearing how God wills
the debt be paid; do not dwell on the form of the punishment, think
of what comes next, think that at worst it cannot go on beyond
the great judgment.
Those who have been guilty of pride and vainglory atone for their
sins by carrying huge boulders that all but flatten them to the ground.
Once they looked with lifted chin on the world as their oyster; now
they are as a pair of claws scuttling across the floor of unknown seas,
weighted down so that their gaze is on the ground.
To impose such corporeal punishment on souls involves concep-
tual difficulties. How can a separated soul be oppressed by the weight
of matter? Dante several times calls attention to the fact that, unlike
Virgil and the others whom they meet, he alone casts a shadow and
makes footprints. He is still a man, body and soul, but the souls of
the departed no longer have a body. How can they be corporeally
punished?
Although the literal meaning of the passage raises such difficul-
ties, we have no trouble with its allegorical sense. Those who have
lifted themselves up high must be brought low. And the desire for
lowliness is simply a full realization of the fact that God is He Who
is and we are his creatures, dependent for every moment of our ex-
istence on his sustaining will; comparatively speaking, we are noth-
ing at all. In that humble realization our elevation becomes possible.
Blessed are the meek, the humble, because their reward is the incom-
prehensible glory of the vision of God. Domenico Bassi comments,
Humility is the emptiness the soul makes in itself and of itself, in order
that God might fill it; the proud consider themselves the proprietors
of everything and lack that poverty that gives the right, so to speak, to
the supreme richness. That is why Saint Augustine says that Mary was
pleasing to God because of her virginity, but it was because of her hu-
mility that she conceived Him: Virginitate placuit, humilitate concepit.14
In the Convivio 4.5, Dante had already linked the Incarnation and
the Roman Empire. The divine plan will come to fruition in the fullness
of time; the world must be readied for the coming of the Son of God.
That readiness on the political plane, he tells us, required that the whole
earth be brought under one regime. The Rome founded after the long
journey of Aeneas from Troy became the master of the known world:
E però che ne la sua venuta nel mondo, non solamente lo cielo, ma la

terra convenia essere in ottima disposizione; e la ottima disposizione
de la terra sia quando ella è monarchia, cioè tutta ad uno principe,
come detto è di sopra; ordinato fu per lo divino provedimento quello
popolo e quella cittade che ciò dovea compiere, cioè la gloriosa Roma.
But in order that at His coming into the world both heaven and
earth might be in the best disposition, and the best disposition of the
earth is when there is monarchy, that is, everyone under one prince,
as was said above; divine providence ordained that that people and
that city should accomplish this, that is, glorious Rome.
Rome, David, Mary—these three are linked by Dante as he reflects on

the Annunciation.15
Vinum non habent: They have no wine
No images are inscribed on the livid pavement of the next terrace,

where dwell the souls of the envious, for their eyes are sewn shut. The
proud labored under weighty stones; the punishment of the envious
is blindness. Dante and his guide climb to this second level to find
seated figures. In life these souls saw the good that happened to others
as a threat, and they wanted to confiscate it rather than rejoice in the

happiness of others. Virgil has not been here before, of course; he is
in as much need of guidance as Dante. We sense the gradual diminu-
tion of his initial role until, at the end of the ascent of the mountain,
he will turn Dante over entirely to another. Virgil prays for help, and
winged spirits appear. They are singing “Vinum non habent”: “They
have no wine” (Purg. 13.29).
The words evoke the scene of Christ’s first miracle, the wedding
feast of Cana in John 2. (Like the Annunication, this event will twice
provide examples of Mary’s virtue.) The wedding feast is well under
way, the guests have drunk to the happiness of the newlyweds with
gusto, and the wine is running low. Mary goes to her Son and tells
him, “They have no wine.” The words emerge from her compassion
for the couple; the prospect of empty glasses with nothing more to fill
them will be an embarrassment and take some glow from the celebra-
tion. That is the sense of her remark to Jesus. Imagine how differently
those words might be spoken by another, you or I perhaps, with a
little lilt in the voice, widened eyes, lifted brows, calling attention to
the impending embarrassment of the hosts.
Jesus’s response to his Mother is noteworthy, and it might seem
cold. “What is that to me and thee?” And, more significantly, “My
hour has not yet come” (John 2:4). Jesus has yet to manifest his di-
vinity by performing miracles, and we are invited to think that he
intended to put that off to a later day. And now his mother has come
to him, and he seems indifferent to the plight of the newlyweds. Mary
knows better. She instructs the servants to do what Jesus tells them.
At his direction they fill huge jars with water, which, when ladled up,
turns out to be not merely wine but wine far better than had been
served. And we are given the prudent judgment of the steward: One
doesn’t save the best wine until last but serves it first. Once the headi-
ness of the best wine takes effect, a lesser vintage can be brought out.
The miracle has reversed that order.
This first miracle of Jesus is prompted by his mother, as if her
intercession suffices for him to change his mind. His hour has come
after all. What has prompted Mary is the virtue opposed to envy. The
envious would take wicked pleasure from the prospect of a wedding
feast winding down because of the embarrassing fact that there is no
more wine. How amusing. How fitting that the father of the bride, up
to this point the beaming master of the revels, should be brought low
by such a humiliation.
The virtuous response, in contrast, is one of sympathy, of shar-
ing the possible pain of the givers of the feast, and of acting out of
that sympathy. The good of others is to be rejoiced in; their evil is to
be deplored and, if possible, alleviated. “They have no wine.” In the
Paradiso (33.16–18) we are told that Mary not only responds to our
pleas for help but sometimes gives her help even before it is asked.
That is surely the case here. No one has brought the problem to her,
but she brings herself to the problem. One of the winged spirits in the
Purgatorio adds another maxim to the mix: “Love thy enemies.”
Atto dolce di madre: Sweet motherly deed
As Dante and his guide struggle through dark smoke to the third
terrace of the mountain, the scene seems to be one from the Inferno.
The air is acrid and gritty. Dante cannot see where they are going, and
Virgil urges him to keep near lest they be separated. Dante follows as
a blind man follows his guide.
The smarting smoke that envelops them represents the way in
which wrath blinds us to the good. In the Inferno (8.42) one of the
wrathful had tried to upset the little boat ferrying Dante and Virgil
across the Styx, and Virgil had fended him off, crying, “Get out of
here to the other dogs.” The wrathful who are damned become dogs.
In the Purgatorio, the effects of wrath are done away with by acquir-
ing the meekness of the Lamb of God.
Dante and Virgil hear around them the voices of penitents singing
the Agnus Dei: “Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,
have mercy on us.” The singing of the Agnus Dei is part of the therapy
of this level; it soothes savage breasts of the effects of sins of anger
during their earthly lives. The mildness of the lamb is contrasted with
the unbridled passion of the wrathful. The meekness of the lamb rep-
resents the virtue opposed to wrath. John the Baptist identified Jesus
as the Lamb of God, and the preeminent model of what we are called
to be is the Incarnate God.16 Mothers sometimes teach their children
a simple prayer: “Jesus meek and humble of heart, make my heart like
unto thine.” My own mother taught it to me, and in doing this she
was playing a role not unlike that of the Blessed Mother. Naturally, we
resist this ideal meekness, just as we resist the call to humility. All the
capital sins are children of pride, and pride is resistance to our condi-
tion as creatures. Again, we see how the model of Christian perfection
flies in the face of our human, all too human, self-assertion, and in-
deed is the very opposite of religion within the limits of reason alone.
Jesus, the lamb of God, presents himself as the sacrificial victim.
He is the price of our salvation. Silent before unjust accusation, he
willingly accepts the most ignominious of deaths in order to set us
free from all the sins that chain us and separate us from the one thing
needful. How does Mary exemplify meekness?
Ivi me parve in una visïone

estatica di sùbito esser tratto,
e vedere in un tempio più persone;
e una donna, in su l’entrar, con atto
dolce de madre dicer: “Figliuol mio,
perché hai tu così verso noi fatto?
Ecco, dolenti, lo tuo padre e io
ti cercavamo.”
(Purg. 15.85–92)
There I seemed caught up in an ecstatic vision and saw many people

in a temple, and a woman at the door who with the sweetness of a
mother said, “My Son, why have you done this to us? Behold, your
father and I have sought you sorrowing.”
The loss of the child Jesus in the temple, referred to in these lines, is
the third of the seven sorrows of the Blessed Virgin but the fifth joyful
mystery of the rosary. The sorrow points to those dreadful three days
during which Mary and Joseph sought their missing son, and the joy-
ful mystery to the happy outcome when Jesus is discovered in the
temple, astounding the elders with his interpretations of Scripture.
In this scene, Mary seems to be scolding Jesus, just as his re-
sponse seems something less than filial; he chides her for spending
three long sorrowful days searching for him. We might imagine Mary
as more than annoyed, as angry. Yet Dante takes her reaction here to
be a revelation of her meekness, mansuetudo. The sixteenth-century
theologian Cornelius of Lapide warns us against the interpretation
just given.
These words of his mother, Cornelius argues, are to be taken not
as scolding him but rather as spoken in wonder and sorrow, to explain
the sorrow of his parents to him. We are meant to see in Mary’s words
the veneration of the mother for such a son, namely, the God Man; thus
it is likely, Cornelius reasons, that she spoke to him not publicly in the
gathering of the elders but privately, either calling him from the gather
ing or waiting until after it had dispersed. And of course, Cornelius
gives us the testimony of other scriptural exegetes to this effect.17 He
points out, moreover, that the acts of Christ are threefold: those that de-
rive as such from his divinity, to create, preserve, and govern all things;
those that derive from his humanity, such as eating and sleeping; and
those that are a mixture of each, including teaching and performing
miracles. Christ is subject to his parents in his purely human acts but
not in the others, and that is the point of his reply to his mother.
St. Thomas considers clemency and meekness together. He dis-
tinguishes them by explaining clemency as the leniency of a superior
toward an inferior, whereas meekness can be shown by anyone to
anyone. In both cases they are the opposite of anger or the irascible.
Meekness governs the desire for revenge, and clemency bears on pen-
alties to be inflicted. Thus, Thomas opposes meekness to wrathfulness
and clemency to cruelty. Now if meekness is the virtuous moderation
of anger, the biblical passage on Mary’s words in the temple suggests
that although Mary mastered her annoyance, she nonetheless felt it.18
But surely, Thomas retorts, wrath or anger is not always a vice. In
the Disputed Questions on Evil he invokes St. John Chrysostom, St.
Paul, Gregory the Great, and the Glossa Ordinaria (a celebrated medi-
eval commentary on Scripture) on behalf of justified anger. Meekness
and clemency are treated in his Summa theologiae as parts of temper-
ance, which governs our natural impulse to anger. Thomas recalls the
ancient quarrel between Stoics and Aristotelians, the former treat-
ing all anger as a vice, whereas the latter held that sometimes anger
is good. As a passion, anger has a formal and a material aspect. The
formal aspect is the desire for revenge, the appetitus vindictae. The ma-
terial aspect is the bodily disturbance—the rush of blood, the physical
agitation. As a passion, anger is a sense appetite, something we experi-
ence willy-nilly in certain circumstances. But there is more in us than
instinct, the mindless response to our circumstances. Our will enters
in, and with it reason or intellect, and then our action—for now, by
involving reason and will, it is our action, a conscious human act and
not merely an event that happens to us—will be either good or bad.
For it is obvious that when someone seeks recompense according to

the ordered requirement of justice, this is a virtue; for example, when
punishment is required as correction to sin, the right order being ob-
served; and this is to be wrathful toward sin. However, when one seeks
vengeance but not in an ordered way, it is a sin, either when one seeks
more than justice requires, or intends the extermination of the sinner
rather than the abolition of sin. (De malo, q. 12, a. 1)
Given these distinctions, Thomas concludes that there is no differ-

ence between the Stoic and the Aristotelian, since the Stoic too must
hold that there is justifiable anger. The Stoic, noting that passion often
impedes reason, judges that what is material in anger, the instinc-
tive reaction that must be directed by reason, is defective as such. In
short, all anger would be a vice. But surely this is wrong:
Because man’s nature is composed of soul and body and of an intellec-

tual and sensitive nature, it pertains to the good of man that his whole
self be subject to virtue, that is, his mind, sensitive part, and body;
therefore the virtue of man requires that the fitting desire for revenge be
not solely in the rational soul, but also in the sensitive part and in the
body too, and the body is moved to serve virtue. (Ibid.)
Furthermore, the Stoic should consider that passion relates to rea-

son diversely, sometimes antecedently, sometimes consequently. In
the first sense, it sweeps reason along, and this is scarcely virtuous,
whereas in the second sense, as following on reason, passion is at
the service of the rational judgment, and is virtuous. Indeed, it helps
enact the judgment of reason.
“Your father and I have sought you sorrowing.” The sorrow that
Mary naturally feels at the loss of her Son is subsumed by the virtue
of meekness.
Maria corse con fretta a la montagna: Mary ran with haste to the
mountain
As we have seen, the sin of sloth is represented on the terrace that

separates the three below it from the three above. Only one canto is
devoted to the capital sin of sloth and its opposed virtue. Dante and
Virgil, after a discussion of free will—actually, the second installment
of it—come upon the penitents of this level. (The discussions of free
will are undertaken lest the assumptions of the Christian vocation,
and of the Comedy, be undermined.) The rushing band of souls work-
ing off the lingering stain of sloth cry out, as they approach:
Tosto fur sovr’ a noi, perché correndo

si movea tutta quella turba magna;
e due dinanzi gridavan piangendo:
“Maria corse con fretta a la montagna”;
(Purg. 18.97–100)
There soon drew near a great crowd on the run and two of them,
weeping, cried out, “Mary ran with haste to the mountain.”
The reference is to the account in Luke of the angel’s visit to Mary.

Part of Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary was that her cousin Elizabeth
was also with child, whereupon Mary set off straightway to visit her
and hurried up the mountain to the city of Judea. The promptness of
Mary’s act makes it a model of zeal, the virtue opposed to the vice of
sloth:
Now in those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country,
to a town of Juda. And she entered the house of Zachary and saluted
Elizabeth. And it came to pass, when Elizabeth heard the greeting of
Mary, that the babe in her womb leapt. And Elizabeth was filled with
the Holy Spirit and cried out with a loud voice saying, “Blessed art thou
amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. And how have I
deserved that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold,
the moment that the sound of thy greeting came to my ears, the babe in
my womb leapt for joy. And blessed is she who has believed, because the
things promised her by the Lord shall be accomplished.” (Luke 1:39–45)
We may pause a moment here to reflect, has any other part of

Scripture had a more enduring and pervasive effect on the Church’s
liturgy than the first chapter of Luke? The joyful mysteries of the ro-
sary take us through it again and again. And of course the Angelus
prayer recapitulates the Annunciation scene: “Angelus Domini an-
nuntiavit Mariae; et concepit de Spiritu Sancto” (The angel of the Lord
declared unto Mary and she conceived of the Holy Spirit). This is fol-
lowed by an Ave Maria, then “Ecce ancilla domini; fiat mihi secundum
verbum tuum” (Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me
according to thy word). Another Ave Maria, then “Verbum caro fac-
tum est, et habitavit in nobis” (The Word was made flesh and dwelled
amongst us). Ave Maria, then “Ora pro nobis, Sancta Dei Genetrix, ut
digni efficiamur promissionibus Christi” (Pray for us O holy Mother
of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ).
Cornelius of Lapide, in his discussion of Luke, provides examples
of what the fathers and doctors of the Church have said on the passage
describing Mary’s visit to Elizabeth. “In those days” is interpreted to
mean that this event took place the day after the Annunciation. And
why did Mary go? Cornelius gives four reasons. First, in order that
the Word conceived within her might be announced to others and his
grace communicated to them; in short, she wanted Christ to begin
his office of Savior, the reason for his coming, even while he was still
in her womb. St. Ambrose (as cited by Cornelius) adds that she did
not go out of disbelief that her aged cousin was pregnant, nor because
she doubted the news the angel had given her. Second, the visit had
the intention of absolving Elizabeth’s child, John the Baptist, of origi-
nal sin. Third, the visit was to help the older woman. And,
Fourth, that she might give to all future ages a striking example of hu-
mility and charity, by which, now made Mother of God and queen of
the world, she deigned to go to Elizabeth who should more properly

have tended to and served her, in order that we too should follow her
example and willingly visit the poor and those beneath us, in order to
cheer them and brace up their souls.19
St. Ambrose (as cited by Cornelius) has this to say about the
phrase that Dante stresses—she ran con fretta, with haste. A first rea-
son for haste is lest she be outside her home too long and be delayed
in public; Ambrose invokes an admonition to virgins not to dwell in
the piazza or chat with others. Another and perhaps more persuasive
reason is that, full of the joy of the Holy Spirit, she was prompted by
it to hurry to her cousin.
Is sloth simply laziness, tepidity, lack of promptitude? That is its
obvious meaning, and the one that shines forth in canto 18, whose
opposite is exemplified by the immediacy of Mary’s response to the
angelic news that her cousin was with child. But that does not exhaust
the meaning of this vice. Psalm 90(91) was once invoked in exploring
those further meanings, and verses 3–6 could be found in the pre–
Vatican II Latin breviary as follows:
3. For he has freed me from the hunter’s snare, and from the bitter
word.
4. You will be protected by his shoulders and will hope beneath his
wings.
5. You will be protected by the shield of his truth: nor will you fear the
terror of the night,
6. or the arrow that flies in the daytime, neither the pestilence hid-
den in shadows nor the attack of the noonday devil (daemonio
meridiano).20
The daemonio meridiano in verse 6, translated as the noonday devil,

has disappeared from the current breviary and, indeed, he never made
it into either the Rheims-Douay or the King James Bibles, which have
“the destruction that lays waste at noonday” and “the destruction that
wasteth at noonday,” respectively. What was the noonday devil sup-
posed to be? Andrew Greeley, in reviewing for the New York Times a
novel of mine with that title, remarks that in the seminary they were
taught that this devil is lust. There is not a perfect identification of

lust with sloth, but acedia or sloth, as we shall see, is connected with
sins of the flesh.
St. Thomas describes sloth, like envy, as opposed to the joy of
charity; it is opposed to the divine good, just as envy is opposed to
the good of one’s neighbor. It is an aggravated sadness that impedes
action. The slothful are frigid, frozen in inactivity; they are those for
whom all is tedium.
This kind of sadness is always an evil; sometimes just as such, some-

times because of its effect. That sadness is as such evil which bears on
something apparently evil but truly good, just as conversely evil delight
is of the truly evil and only apparently good. Since spiritual good is the
true good, sadness with respect to spiritual good is per se evil. But that
sadness too which is of what is truly evil can be evil in its effect, and thus
it agitates a man such that he totally withdraws from good works; hence
the Apostle (2 Cor. 2:7) does not want any penitent to be absorbed by
too great a sadness because of sin. Therefore, acedia as understood here
signifies spiritual sadness and is twice evil, in itself and in its effect. (ST
IIaIIae, q. 35, a. 1)
Since any sin can be said to involve sadness about some spiritual
good, according to Thomas, it may seem that acedia cannot be a spe-
cial vice. Nor can we simply say that such sadness comes into play
because a spiritual good is difficult or entails bodily discomfort in-
compatible with sensual pleasure. That would be true of any carnal
vice. What is necessary to understanding sloth is the recognition that
there is an order of spiritual goods, with the divine good being chief
among them. The special virtue of charity bears on the divine good,
and charity brings with it a joy in the divine good. Thus, although any
sin entails sadness with respect to a spiritual good, sadness as to the
acts consequent upon charity gives rise to the special vice of acedia
(ST IIaIIae, q. 35, a. 2). This justifies calling acedia a capital sin, since
just as the delights of all the virtues are ordered to that of charity, sim-
ilarly, sadness about the latter gives rise to other and lesser sadnesses
(a. 4). Thus, one who feels sadness with respect to spiritual goods is
led on to carnal activities: the pursuit of pleasure in the usual sense
stems from fleeing the greatest spiritual good, the gaudium caritatis
or joy of charity (a. 4, ad 2).
Spiritual goods, which sadden the one in the grip of acedia, are both
ends and means. Flight from the end is caused by despair, whereas flight
from the means to the end, insofar as they are arduous and come under
counsel, is caused by pusillanimity; with respect to what pertains to
common justice, it is caused by torpor about the precepts. The belliger-
ence of those saddened by spiritual goods sometimes is directed against
those who urge us to spiritual goods, and one comes to detest them, and
this is properly malice. However, insofar as one is led by sadness in face
of spiritual goods to external pleasures, a daughter of acedia is “flight to
the illicit.” (ST IIaIIae, q. 35, a. 4, ad 3)
(These daughters of acedia also enable Thomas to accommodate re-

marks of Gregory the Great and Isidore about the various defects in
monastic life: idleness, somnolence, curiosity, verbosity, restlessness,
and instability.)
Dante would have been aware of these refinements of the notion
of sloth. Without them, we would be tempted to think of it as mere
sluggishness or laziness—on the order of “Oh, how I hate to get up
in the morning, O how I hate to get out of bed” in objection to those
whose kinetic energy keeps them bouncing around. These further re-
flections are essential if we are to understand sloth as a capital sin, as
in Dante, and not merely as the opposite of feverish activity.
Non erat eis locus in deversorio: There was no room in the inn
Unlike the descent through the Inferno, which was accomplished in

a single day, the ascent of Mount Purgatory takes several days, and
given days, several nights, nights during which Dante sleeps. All ac-
tivity ceases during the night there, but only Dante is in need of sleep.
This calls attention to his anomalous presence in the other world; he
is a man of flesh and blood, his feet make impressions when he walks,
his body casts a shadow, and with the onset of night he requires sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream. Canto 19 of the Purgatorio opens with
an account of a dream Dante had while he slept. An ugly woman ap-

pears to him, but she gradually becomes attractive and announces
that she is the Siren whose seductive song has led so many mariners
to their doom.
When I was in the Marine Corps boot camp long ago, we were
shown various films, some of them having to do with the perils
of liberty—in the military sense. In one of them, the actor Robert
Benchley, improbably attired in uniform, enters a bar, orders a drink,
and notices an ugly woman several stools away. He turns from her to
his drink. He goes on drinking. When he looks at the woman after a
passage of time, she is transformed, and her ugliness has given way
to a seductive beauty. There is no need to dwell on the sequel and the
lesson the film was meant to teach. Something like this takes place in
Dante’s dream, but the seductive role is played not by alcohol but by
concupiscence. A lot of space is accorded to this dream, and it can be
regarded as the prelude to the three capital sins yet to be dealt with:
avarice, gluttony, and lust. “Love calls us to the things of this world,”
the poet Richard Wilbur wrote. Dante would doubtless want to sub-
stitute “concupiscence” for “love” in that sentence.
Domenico Bassi connects Dante’s dream to St. Paul in Romans
13, where Paul gives expression to a thought that rules the Comedy:
“Let every soul be subject to the higher authorities, for there exists
no authority except from God, and those that exist are appointed by
God. Therefore he who resists the authority, resists the ordinance of
God; and they that resist bring on themselves condemnation” (Rom.
13:1–2). Then, having listed some of the commandments one must
observe—Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal—Paul
likens ignoring them to living in a dream:
And this do, understanding the time, for it is now the hour for us to
rise from sleep, for now our salvation is nearer than when we came
to believe. The night is far advanced; the day is at hand. Let us there-
fore lay aside the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light. Let
us walk becomingly as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not
in debauchery and wantonness, not in strife and jealousy. But put on
the Lord Jesus Christ, and as for the flesh, take no thought for its lusts.
(Rom. 13:11–13)
Preferring temporal to eternal goods might be a definition of

the sins on the upper three terraces of Mount Purgatory. Material
possessions, food and drink, and venereal pleasure are all good
things, but they are good for us only insofar as they are integrated
into our comprehensive good. When we try to make them serve as
the be-all and end-all of life, when they become our gods—St. Paul
said of the glutton, “whose god is his belly”—our actions are sinful.
This is the explanation of the upper three terraces that Virgil, when
he was explaining the geography of Purgatory to Dante, promised to
give later.
If we had to come up with a symbolic figure of avarice, we might
think of Midas, or Dickens’s Scrooge, or the miser in Balzac’s Eu
genie Grandet running his greedy fingers through his gold. Dante
puts before us numerous examples including a French king and a
pope, choices with obvious political ramifications. Dante lamented
that popes had betrayed the Church by their avarice, yet he also la-
ments the French king who assaulted Pope Boniface VIII at Anagni,
a pope Dante excoriated as a person; but it is the papal office he
defends here.
Such figures represent the vice; Mary represents the opposite of
avarice, that is, poverty. Dante has in mind Luke’s account of Christ’s
birth.
Now it came to pass in those days, that a decree went out from Caesar
Augustus that a census of the whole world should be taken. This first
census took place while Cyrinus was governor of Syria. And all were
going, each to his own town, to register. And Joseph also went from
Galilee out of the town of Nazareth into Judea to the town of David,
which is called Bethlehem—because he was of the house and family of
David—to register, together with Mary his espoused wife who was with
child. And it came to pass while they were there, that the days for her to
be delivered were fulfilled. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and
wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because
there was no room for them in the inn. (Luke 2:1–7)
Penitents invoke this scriptural passage to contrast their own sins

with the poverty of the Blessed Virgin:
Noi andavam con passi lenti e scarsi,

e io attento a l’ombre, ch’i’ sentia
pietosamente piangere et lagnarsi;
e per ventura udi’ “Dolce Maria!”
dinanzi a noi chiamar così nel pianto
come fa donna che in parturir sia;
e seguitar: “Povera fosti tanto,
quanto veder si può per quello ospizio
dove sponesti il tuo portato santo.”
(Purg. 20.16–24)
With slow and short steps we went on, and I was intent on the shades,
hearing their pitiful weeping and lamenting, when I chanced to hear
one ahead of us call tearfully, “Sweet Mary!” sounding like a woman
who is giving birth, and he went on, “How poor you were can be seen
from that inn in which you laid down your holy burden.”
The penitents cry out to Sweet Mary, whose poverty was manifest
at the nativity when she had nowhere to lay her newborn son but in a
manger. Many have seen in this passage the powerful influence on Dante
of St. Francis of Assisi—Dante himself was a member of the Franciscan
Third Order, a lay order. Poverty, one of the three vows of the religious
life, along with chastity and obedience, was often more honored in the
breach than in the observance. The Franciscan order had lifted poverty
to new heights. The voluntary turning away from possessions and from
the goods of this world was the soul’s opening to the eternal.
The contemptus mundi that had been urged upon members of re-
ligious orders, and not only on them, could be distorted into a devalu-
ation of the created order, as if lesser goods were not goods at all. Here
we find the seeming paradox of St. Francis. In embracing Lady Poverty
he turned his back on lesser goods, but at the same time he became the
poet of nature, expressing our kinship with every living thing. This is an
ordered love of the things of this world. In Francis’s words, “Benedicite
omnia opera Domini Domino”—Blessed by the Lord are all the works
of the Lord. What we call the necessities of life are just that; we cannot
live without them. Food and drink may be lesser goods, but we need
them to survive, just as the species needs the sexual drive to replenish
itself. Franciscan poverty draws attention in a dramatic way to the fact

that the pursuit of lesser goods must be ordered.
Those doing penance for avarice on Mount Purgatory lie face
down—“My soul is prostrate in the dust” (Ps. 118[119]:25)—symbolizing
a disordered attachment to wealth and to the things of this world.
Dante understands the temptation to which those doing penance here
have succumbed. He is not merely a spectator, nor are we meant to
be. In other works, such as the Convivio and his letters, he confesses
listening to the siren song that promised wealth, pleasures, and all the
rest. Is it only because he never attained wealth that he can see how
incommensurable it is to man’s desire for the good? That would be a
cynical conclusion. Thomas Aquinas did hold, however, that the best
argument against the belief that such goods as wealth, food, and plea-
sure are able to fulfill our heart’s desire is to have had them. Dante has
certainly known many pleasures, and they are dust and ashes. Vanity
of vanities, all is vanity, to quote Ecclesiastes. And to call this thought
a leitmotif of the Psalms would be an understatement: “Lo, thou has
made my days but a span, and what is the length of my days, and my
life is as nothing before thee; every man is but a breath. Man passes
away like a mere shadow, his worrying is all in vain, he gathers up and
knows not who shall reap” (Ps. 38[39]:67). Some vices attract an indi-
vidual more than others; in contrast to other vices, Dante gave short
shrift to acedia, a vice to which apparently he was never tempted.
At this point in the cantica the Roman poet Statius appears.
The five hundred years he has spent on this terrace are over. His re-
lease has been signaled by a quaking of the mountain and shouts of
thanksgiving and singing of the Gloria in excelsis Deo, but he lingers
to speak with these two strange pilgrims. He is, it emerges, an ad-
mirer of Virgil; his own epics were inspired by the Aeneid. All this
bursts forth before Statius realizes that Dante’s guide is Virgil himself.
At that, he kneels to kiss the hem of the great poet’s garment but is
prevented by Virgil. We are thus given yet another indication of why
Virgil was chosen by Beatrice for the role he plays in the Comedy.
We now have three poets, Virgil, Dante, and Statius, and they
will soon speak with other poets, contemporaries of Dante. We shall
return later to the suite of cantos called the cantos of the poets. For
now, we have Statius’s testimony to Virgil that the great epic poet was
the cause of Statius’s conversion to Christianity. As if wishing to cover

for the fact that there is no historical basis for this conversion, Dante
presents Statius as a secret Christian, one who sympathized with the
martyrs who were led into the Coliseum but could not bring himself
to join them. Virgil’s role in his conversion is linked to Virgil’s fourth
Eclogue, in which, to the early Church, the pagan poet had seemed
to prophesy the coming of Christ. Thus the effect of Virgil on Statius
was twofold—thanks to Virgil, Statius has become first a poet and
then a Christian. Virgil is portrayed as a guide who held a lamp be-
hind him, lighting for others a way he did not go himself.
Why did Statius have to repent for five hundred years on the ter-
race of the avaricious? Virtue is a via media, flanked by opposite vices,
and the vice opposite to avarice is prodigality, a mindless stewardship
of worldly goods. That was Statius’s vice. Virgil tells Statius of all the
great poets confined in Limbo, to which he himself must return, and
the three continue together and are soon on the next terrace.
Nondum venit hora mea: My hour is not yet come
The sixth terrace is the one on which sins of gluttony are repented.
For Mary as an example of the opposite virtue, Dante returns once
more to the account of the wedding feast at Cana found in the Gos-
pel of John. Earlier, he had found in Mary’s behavior compassion for
their hosts, who were running out of wine. Now he finds another
significance in her prompting Her Son to perform his first public
miracle.
As the three poets walk, they come upon a tree with sweet-
smelling fruit. It is a tree of curious shape, like an upside-down fir
tree, perhaps to prevent its being climbed. As they approach, a voice
warns them not to eat of this tree. We are reminded of the Tree of the
Knowledge of Good and Evil in Eden, but the voice continues:
Poi disse: “Più pensava Maria onde

fosser le nozze orrevoli e intere,
ch’a la sua bocca . . .
(Purg. 22.142–144)
Then it said, “Mary thought more that the wedding feast should be
honorable and complete than of her own hunger.”
Mary’s concern is the success of the wedding celebration rather than

filling her mouth. It was not a desire for more to drink that prompted
her. Chiavacci Leonardi finds this a somewhat forced use of the text,
commenting that “the paucity of evangelical texts that speak of Mary
offered little choice.”21 One might rather say that a surprising num-
ber of texts mention Mary, but perhaps that would seem forced in its
turn. Dante also might have chosen his example from the Magnificat:
“the hungry he has filled with good things and the rich he has sent
away empty.”
Because of the pleasure associated with eating and drinking,
whose objects are necessary if we are to live, the rational moderation
of them can be difficult. One cannot swear off drinking except in the
sense of drinking certain beverages or too much of a certain kind of
beverage, but beverage we must have. The fact that rational control
of such activities can be difficult, given their centrality in our lives,
explains why sin often occurs as we engage in them.22 Gluttony is
the immoderate desire for food, not just the consumption of it. One
might very well take more than one needs under the assumption that
it is as much as one needs, and this would not be gluttony. Imagine
some new and exotic food about whose effects one is unaware, such
that a little bit counts as a lot. Gluttony proper is the desire for an im-
moderate amount, followed for the most part by eating an immod-
erate amount, but the latter is consequent on the former. When it is
not, as in the example suggested, there is no gluttony. Nor is there
any constant objective measure of too much or too little; this varies
from person to person, and each must moderate his desire accord-
ing to his disposition. A fighter in training will need more food than
the reporter reporting on him. Morever, gluttony can be a venial,
not a mortal sin. It is a capital sin insofar as the immoderate desire
for food becomes one’s defining goal, one’s ultimate end: cuius deus
venter est.
We notice, once again, that the objects of the capital sins that
are expiated on the top three levels of Purgatory bear on things—
possessions, money; food and drink; sexual activity. None of these
objects is evil in itself; indeed, each in its way is necessary for human
beings. Capital sins arise from the immoderate desire for these ob-
jects, elevating a particular good into the overwhelming rationale for
our deeds, and the fact that such immoderate desire gives birth to
other faults.
Those doing penance for gluttony are portrayed as an anorexic
band, tormented by hunger and thirst and with barely enough flesh
on their bones. This suggests perhaps the vice opposed to gluttony:
as prodigality relates to avarice, so we might say that dieting relates
to gluttony. Dieting, that is, in the sense of a deliberate denial of food
and drink related not to the first good, or rational moderation, but
to another lesser good—the dream of slimness, wellness, rippling
middle-aged muscles, and all the fads that would seem to amount to
desperate efforts to drive out thoughts of ageing and mortality. The
mirror on my lady’s table, called ominously a vanity, is perhaps an
innocent version of this. Who has not felt a foolish pleasure in being
told he looks younger than he is, as if somehow the common lot of
shuffling visibly toward the end had been abrogated for us, while oth-
ers, sans hair, sans teeth, sans everything, visibly age. Think of the
manic joggers, the desperate devils on their treadmills, those whose
glowing flesh is acquired in tanning parlors, face lifts, liposuction,
and so on. Is there not excess in this? But of course, another vanity
is in noticing this, possibly a version of acedia. Between the obesity
consequent on gluttony and the painfully acquired svelteness that is
the opposite vice resides the virtue of temperance. And here, as al-
ways, Mary is the first exemplar of the virtue.
Virum non cognosco: I know not man
And so we arrive at the seventh and last terrace, devoted to atoning

for sins of lust. Before the travelers encounter any souls on this ter-
race, however, Dante takes up a question, the answer to which has
been assumed all along. In the Inferno, in the moving encounter with
Paolo and Francesca, the doomed lovers are locked in an eternal em-
brace. At the time Dante did not ask how souls can embrace, nor did
the deeper issues of how souls can suffer the quite physical pains of
hell (or purgatory) detain him. Now, before the last step of emerging
from the uppermost terrace of the seven storey mountain, the ques-
tion is at last posed.
Several times along the way, mention had been made of the fact
that Dante makes footprints and casts a shadow. The shades he meets
do not. Are they simply separated souls? If so, what explains the
seeming bodies, shapes, voices, and the rest? Is that to be taken as
merely imaginary, a poetic necessity? Canto 25 gives Dante’s answer,
which deserves at least brief mention. Virgil turns the question over
to Statius, who provides a lengthy resumé of the Aristotelian embry-
ology that was taken over by medievals such as St. Thomas Aquinas.
In this account the embryo is not human until God breathes a soul
into it. There are profound problems associated with such a theory
of postponed animation, but those problems will not detain us now.
What is important is that Statius, in his account of the development
of the now human embryo, refers to the formation of a first spectral
body before the actual, physical body is complete, as if the soul, now
animating the embryo, first produces the plan of the physical body
that later will form. This may seem an idle point, until we consider
the state of the soul after death. And that is Dante’s problem, as it has
been from the outset. He must attempt to answer such questions as:
How can the souls of the departed be affected by physical punish-
ment? How can they suffer from fire, for example? And how can they
grow thin, as with the emaciated shades on the previous terrace who
are expiating for gluttony? His solution is that a spectral body accom-
panies the soul after death. Hence the departed are visible to Dante,
not merely as a poetic device but in reality. As Chiavacci Leonardi
suggests, we do not find in Dante the merely separated soul, that is,
the “form” of the body released from the body and now quite inde-
pendent of it. The departed for Dante are not soul and physical body,
as on earth, but soul and spectral body. (As she also points out, this is
one of the most extended and self-contained theoretical passages in
the entire cantica.)
Fire did not play a central role in Dante’s depiction of the tor-
ments of the damned, nor has it figured in the purgations of the pre-
vious terraces. Now the travelers see the souls of the lustful being
purged by fire. From the depths of the fire, Dante hears voices singing
“Summae Deus clementïae” (Purg. 25.121), “God of supreme clem-

ency,” which, as Dante commentators point out, is from the hymn
sung at Matins on Saturdays. The chief relevance of its appearance
here may perhaps be found in the third stanza:
Our reins and hearts in pity heal,

And with the chastening fires anneal;
Gird thou our loins, each passion quell.
And every harmful lust expel.23
Dante sees spirits walking in the flames; they are singing the hymn,
and when they finish they cry aloud, “Virum non cognosco,” I know
not man. This of course was Mary’s reply to the angel when he told
her she was to become a mother. Taken as a vow to chastity, how can
what the angel tells her come about without abandoning that vow?
The answer is that she will conceive in a wholly miraculous way, be at
once both virgin and mother. The spirits then begin the hymn again,
in lower voices. Once more, the Annunciation as recounted in Luke
is invoked to show Mary as the prime example of purity.
Dante turns now to the lustful sinners. They are of two groups,
those who sinned unnaturally and those who sinned naturally; a divi-
sion, that is, between homosexuality, on the one hand, and fornica-
tion and adultery, on the other.
We live in a sensate age in which it is often said that the sense of
sin has been lost. Certainly there has been an enormous change as
to how, in the modern world, the pleasures of the flesh are regarded.
There has always been a willingness to regard sins of the flesh as less
than serious. How else explain the long puzzlement over Paolo and
Francesca? Is a little hanky-panky really deserving of an eternal pun-
ishment? Dante occupies a world that will seem incredible to those
for whom sex is merely an innocent conjunction, for recreation, not
procreation, an end in itself. Let us state the most obvious difference
between such an attitude and the one that Dante represents. The
point of the division of the species into genders, male and female,
is that families may be formed and children conceived, nourished,
reared, and educated in everything a person needs before launching
out on his or her own. Sex and procreation imply sex and marriage.
Dante’s early poetry dwelled on love, but it was an asexual love and
whatever else he came to find wanting in it, he would not have re-
garded such poetry as a celebration of illicit love, that is, physical love
outside matrimony.
Christianity has always been countercultural, however much at
times this seems muted, as if some detente had been achieved be-
tween believers and the world. Believers who take seriously the Cath-
olic Church’s reminders about the main truths of sexual morality will
realize how out of step the Church and they are with the way we live
now. For the Catholic doctrine on the basis of sexual morality, we can
consult St. Thomas’s Disputed Questions on Evil.
Lust, for Thomas, is the vice opposed to temperance that moder-
ates the pleasures of touch and sex, just as gluttony is opposed to the
moderation of concupiscence with respect to food and drink. Lust is
primarily, then, a want of ordering, a disorder.
This disorder may be either in the interior passions or in exterior
acts that are of themselves disordered, and not disordered simply be-
cause they come from disordered passions. Thomas invokes the par-
allel case of greed or avarice. A man might desire in a disordered way
the acquisition of money; there is nothing wrong per se with acquir-
ing money, but the passion with which one goes about it can be disor-
dered. How so? Because wealth is the avaricious person’s overriding
objective; it is a lesser good put over the higher. Sometimes avarice
not only may consist of disordered desire but may also bear on an act
that is objectively disordered, such as stealing another person’s goods.
Such a one is doubly at fault; both the disordered passion and the
objectively disordered act are contrary to liberality and constitutive
of illiberality. It can be much the same with lust.
One might have a disordered passion and engage in an act that
is of itself legitimate, such as sleeping with one’s spouse. But even
the conjugal act can be vitiated by lust. The marriage licence is not
a licence to licentiousness and orgy. Once this might have been
difficult to acknowledge, but no one can now deny that a man can
rape his wife or that a woman could force her husband against his
wishes. Again, this is a double fault, inner and outer. But some acts
are objectively wrong and are not made wrong merely because of
the disordered passion with which they are undertaken; in Thomas’s
words, “as happens in every use of the genital members outside the
marriage act” (De malo, q. 15). That every such act is disordered in
itself is clear from the fact that every human act is disordered when
it is not proportioned to its proper end. Similarly, eating that is not
proportioned to bodily health, to which it is ordered as to its end, is
disordered. “The end of the use of the genital members is generation
and any use which is not proportioned to the generation of a child
and of the upbringing due it is of itself disordered.” This is why it
is disordered for an unmarried couple to engage in the sexual act,
whether one or both are married to someone else or not. The repro-
ductive system is ordered to reproducing; the sexual act is the way
this is done; to engage in coition humanly is to be aware that a child
may result and that one has obligations to that child which will ex-
tend over many years. Any sex act outside of marriage is objectively
disordered.24
At the time Thomas wrote, and before and after, it was doubt-
less true that many behaved in ways contrary to the truths he ex-
pounds. Sexual morality has doubtless always been observed more
in the breach than in the observance. Our times seem different be-
cause now theories are advanced for what hitherto was recognized as
wrong behavior. It is as if the other sins to which our flesh is heir were
to have theoretical advocates, with the formation of communities of
thieves, of murderers, or of liars, proudly proclaiming their own right
to behave as they do. Because the sexual drive is fierce and funda-
mental, ordered as it is to the propagation of the species, it is subject
to frequent deviant uses.
It is not, of course, my intention here to enter further into these
controversies. Suffice it to say that Dante would have accepted with-
out demur Thomas’s position, as is evident in his treatment of adul-
tery and homosexuality in the Inferno as well as in the penance done
for sins against lust in the Purgatorio, and this despite the fact that
he apparently strayed from time to time in matters of the flesh. He
was more interested in repenting of his sins than seeking to justify
them. When Our Lady appeared in the twentieth century at Fatima,
the heart of her message was the need for purity and chastity. She was
addressing our times. She would lead us out of the dark wood of our
sins, much as she led Dante.
Dante and the Poets
Already in the Vita Nuova we find our author to be a highly self-

conscious poet, much given to comparing his own efforts with those
of others. Teodolinda Barolini25 has tracked the way in which, in the
course of his writings, Dante provides little lists giving the pecking
order of contemporary poetic greatness; she even provides a helpful
chart of these orderings. Poets to whom Dante at one time defers later
fall back on his lists, or are even dropped altogether. Guido Cavalcanti
is a dramatic example. In Dante’s Rime he occupies pride of place in
a list that includes Lapo (Lippo; probably the minor poet Lippo Pasci
d’Bardi), with Dante modestly coming in third. Cavalcanti retains
this prominence in the Vita Nuova, but he fails to show up in similar
rankings in the Convivio and Monarchia. He is reduced to tangential
references in the Comedy, once in the Inferno and once in the Purga-
torio. Such shifts and altered estimates can be discussed in terms of
poetic craft and the “sweet new style” of which Dante finally emerges
as the master. But the discussion of the poets in the Purgatorio sug-
gests that something deeper is at work, something more essentially
related to the great aim of the Comedy—to lead us from the misery of
sin to eternal bliss.
Starting with the appearance of Statius in canto 21, we have a suite
of cantos that have been called the cantos of the poets. Our original
duo is now joined by Statius. Dante depicts himself as following after
Virgil and Statius, listening to them discourse on poetry and learning
as he listens. When Statius realizes that he is confronted by the great
epic poet of the founding of Rome and of the eclogue taken to be a
prophecy of the Incarnation, he is as overwhelmed as Dante was at
the outset of the Comedy. He details the effect that Virgil had on him
and declares, in summary, “Per te poeta fui, per te cristiano” (Purg.
22.73): “you made me both a poet and a Christian.”
George Santayana, in his marvelous little book Three Philosophi-
cal Poets,26 refers to Lucretius as the poet of naturalism, Goethe as
the poet of romanticism, and Dante as the poet of the supernatural.
Santayana groups all three together under the rubric “philosophical
poets.” There is warrant for this homogenization, but in the case of
Dante it is inadequate. Christianity is not a philosophy. Dante would
better be called a theological poet, although his assimilation of Aris-

totle and others gives him claim to the title of philosophical poet as
well. This brings us to a theme I touched on earlier and to which I
promised to return.
In the Republic, Plato describes an ancient quarrel between the
philosopher, of which he is one, and the poet and gives the basis for the
quarrel. But it will occur to any reader of Plato that his philosophical
dialogues are also works of art. Indeed, when Aristotle mentions the
types of poetry in his Poetics, he lists the Platonic dialogues as one of
them. Elsewhere, with reference to the Platonic notion of participa-
tion, Aristotle dismisses it as a mere metaphor, and the metaphor is
the mark of the poet. This is rather a criticism of a transgression of
genera than hostility toward poetry. The ability to see similarities in
dissimilar things is the genius of the poet, and the metaphor is the ve-
hicle of that vision. We expect Aristotle to ponder formal differences
between kinds of discourse, including the nature of that nonpoetic
discourse called philosophy. Aristotle’s answer is laid out for us sche-
matically by Thomas Aquinas in the preface to his commentary on
Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics.27 In developing these thoughts here, I
am providing something more than deep background for understand-
ing Dante. The aim is to become clear as to what kind of poet Dante
was, in terms of the philosophical tradition in which he stood.
The human mind forms its ideas on the basis of sense experi-
ence and then fashions affirmations and denials, which are the loci of
truth—and of its opposite, of course. Affirmations are true when they
capture the ways things are, and false when they fail in this. Prog-
ress occurs here, namely, discourse, the movement from one known
thing to another, but discourse in the richer sense occurs when we
arrive at new truths from old: that is, when we move from the fact
that certain propositions are true to conclude that something else is
true because of them, derivatively. This discourse, or syllogism, is the
mark of our rationality. It is also a sign that while human reason is
the most perfect thing in the physical cosmos, it is the lowest kind of
intelligence in the universe. Despite the great gap between us and the
angels, Thomas loves to speak of human reason as the bottom rung of
a hierarchy that goes up through the progressively more perfect intel-
lects of the angels to God himself. Putting human reason in its place
is by no means to devalue it as such. Indeed, human rationality is the

basis on which we can extrapolate to other forms of understanding
that are not hampered in the ways ours is.
According to Thomas, Aristotle was the first to lay out the formal
logic of the syllogism, in the Prior Analytics. There the topic is the
relationship between symbols rather than what they symbolize. If A
is B and B is C, then A is C. This formality of discourse proliferates
into the figures and modes of syllogism. Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics
turns from the symbols to the symbolized. There is a necessity of con-
sequence in the formal syllogism, but not everything we reason about
is in fact necessary. The necessary is that which cannot be otherwise,
and there are interpreted symbols that yield necessary conclusions,
not just the necessity of consequence.
In explicating Aristotle, Thomas has begun to lay out for us the
cascading types of discourse, from necessary arguments, through
probable or likely reasoning, through persuasive discourse, and then,
after a treatment of how arguments go wrong (fallacies), poetic dis-
course. The last type, he tells us here, as he had in the Summa theo-
logiae, is infima doctrina, “the least of doctrines”—the bottom rung
of human discourse. By the representations he or she puts before us,
the poet leads our mind onward. My love is like a red red rose. Shall I
compare thee to a summer’s day? We are a little world made cunningly.
This cascade from apodictic through probable and forensic dis-
course to poetic discourse may seem to us to be a great put-down
of poetry. It is better to think of it as the comparative location of
poetry. Anyone familiar with the Poetics will know that Aristotle is
fully aware of the power and range of the poetic. The point of any
hierarchy is not that anything less then the first is to be ignored, but
that we not confuse the lesser with the higher. Those in the Aristote-
lian tradition put apodictic discourse first, but not everything lends
itself to such discourse; indeed, in a sense, few things do. Most of
our arguments are probable to one degree or another; most of the
truths we hold are only opinions. The mark of the wise man, Ar-
istotle noted, is to demand and expect of a subject matter only the
degree of rigor it can deliver. If we demanded mathematical rigor
of every argument, we would be sorely disappointed. Think of any
political dispute. Think of arguments in a court room. The primacy

of apodictic discourse begins to look like a reminder of how rare it is.
Against this reminder, we are less likely to think that calling poetic
discourse infima doctrina is a way of saying, “Away with the poet!”
We need poetry just as, in general, we need art. It is worth remem-
bering that Aristotle must have seen a lot of plays in order to write as
he did of Greek tragedy.
Poetry is an imitation, Aristotle stated; art imitates nature. This
is not a plea for photographic realism. The Poetics has come down to
us as a fragment; it gives us an analysis of tragedy. The tragic drama
is an imitation in that it puts before us characters who act in much
the way that members of the audience have acted and do or will act.
But the imitation gives us a logos, a sense of wholeness, that ordinary
life seldom does. In Aristotle’s pithy phrase, the plot, the logos of the
drama, has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
When Thomas says that poetic discourse is infima doctrina in
the Summa, it is in the context of noticing that Scripture is replete
with images and similes and parables. The problem this poses is
the following: if sacred doctrine is the most sublime, why does it so
constantly, almost exclusively, use poetic language and metaphors?
Consider that the metaphors of the poet illumine that which is less
than human by attributing human attributes to it—smiling meadows,
and the like. Some metaphors go in the opposite direction, but they
can be considered parasitic on the first kind. The point of scriptural
metaphors, Thomas argues, is to give us forceful presentations that
speak of God in human and even subhuman terms—he is a father, he
repents of creating man, he is a fire, he is a lion, and so forth. Such
metaphors proportion the divine to us in a way that is far more effec-
tive than abstract characterizations of him.
It is fitting that Sacred Scripture should treat of divine and spiritual

things as similar to the corporeal. God provides for things according
to their natures, and it is natural to man that he should move to under-
standing from the sensible, since all our knowledge takes its rise from
the senses. Thus it is that Sacred Scripture fittingly presents spiritual
things to us by way of bodily metaphors. (ST Ia, q. 1, a. 9)
Thomas adds that Scripture addresses all people, both the wise and
the simple, and thus speaks of spiritual things under bodily simili-
tudes that all can grasp and that the wise, too, need.
He further contrasts the aim of the poet and that of Scripture.
The poet makes use of representations because they are pleasing to
us, generating the shock of recognition, the inner Aha! we feel at the
fittingness of a metaphor. Scripture, on the other hand, uses meta-
phors out of necessity and usefulness. Of course, a literal understand-
ing of Scriptural metaphors would defeat their purpose and lead to an
inappropriate view of God. This is not a great danger, since everyone,
wise and simple, has the hang of metaphors. The very reach of the
metaphors that present God to us have a built-in caveat that we are
learning what God is not rather than what he is.
On Santayana’s account of the philosophical poet, a philosophy—
such as naturalism, romanticism, and supernaturalism—gives us a
view of the whole, and the philosopher has appropriate modes of
argumentation to establish that vision. From the philosophical poet
we do not expect philosophical arguments, but rather we expect the
assumption of the vision that the philosopher argues for, as the back-
ground for poetic representation. Santayana makes a good case for
this, and he is followed in it by his student T. S. Eliot, in Eliot’s lec-
tures on the metaphysical poets. One might demur, at least in part, by
pointing to versified philosophical arguments in Lucretius and Dante,
but by and large it seems a convincing account, with interesting im-
plications for Dante’s claim that the Comedy is an instance of moral
philosophy. More interesting still, perhaps, is to compare the poetic
expression of philosophical claims in the Comedy with more prosaic
expressions of them elsewhere. Examples would be a comparison of
Dante’s embryology, presented by Statius, with the Aristotelian texts
on which it is based, or of Dante’s account of spectral bodies with the
texts of Thomas on which it is based.
In the doctrinal cantos devoted to the problem of love and free-
dom in the Purgatorio—there are three—the doctrine that love is at
the source of all eventually raised the question as to whether we act
freely, once love has come. As we saw earlier, Dante once held this
deterministic view. He now frees himself from it and has Virgil refer
to the error of the blind who had posed as his guides (Purg. 18.18).
Recall again the beginning of the Comedy, when Dante is in the

dark wood, in danger of losing his soul, and the long journey before
him is the path of salvation. But Dante is a poet, and his presence in
that dark wood is at least in part due to his poetic activity. What he
now undertakes, as pilgrim and poet, is the story of his progressive
assimilation of the Christian vocation.
The highest terrace of the upper three of the seven storey moun-
tain concerns lust, which, like avarice and gluttony, puts a lesser good
in the place of the highest good. The discussion of poetry through
these terraces must accordingly bear on the way in which the poet
can mistake a lesser good for the highest good. The great subject of
the poetry of the other poets encountered was love, and presumably
a lesser love that was treated as the dominant point of human life. It
is this assumption of his own early poetry that Dante repents. Under
the influence of Virgil and Statius, he now strives not only for a new
poetic style but for one appropriate to singing of the love that moves
the sun and other stars, and of life as the pursuit of that love. In his
commentaries on the poems in the Vita Nuova he attempts to subli-
mate his love for Beatrice, but after her death he lived a life that was
enveloped by a dark wood, in which the right path was lost. At the
end of the Vita, Dante acknowledges his dissatisfaction with what he
has written of Beatrice and resolves to devote himself to the study
of philosophy and theology in order to write of her as no woman
has ever been written of before. The Comedy is the fulfillment of that
resolution. In it, Beatrice is the representative of true beatitude and
Dante’s guide, at first mediated but finally direct, leading him to a
happiness that can only be found in the next world. Dante became
not only a philosophical poet but, far more importantly, a theological
poet. The preeminence that Dante claims over poets contemporary
with him is precisely that his poetry is now at the service of Love in
the most exalted sense.28
The writer François Mauriac, who was stung by the shocked reac-
tion of fellow Catholics (as well as by André Gide’s jibe that he sought
permission to publish so he wouldn’t have to burn his books), enter-
tained misgivings about his novels. Would it be too much to suggest
that Dante’s allusions in the Comedy to his earlier works, those that
shared the outlook of his fellow poets, convey a similar judgment? In
any case, Dante came to view his earlier poetic practice as harmful to
the writer, as the “cantos of the poets” in the Purgatorio suggest.
The subject of art and morality is usually discussed with refer-
ence to the effect of works of art on the reader. It is intriguing to find
the artist worrying about that, but also worrying about the effect of
what he has written on himself. Is it a repentant poet who is speaking
to us in these cantos of the Purgatorio? Of course, it is not poetry as
such that Dante abjures. He is now engaged in the kind of poetry that
is both fulfilling of the writer and edifying to the reader. For dramatic
contrast, all one need do is compare the Lord Byron of Don Juan with
this learned, mystic, serious poet on his way to heaven, and hoping to
take us with him.
Salire a le stelle: To climb unto the stars
Dante, persuaded to enter the fire in which certain poets and those
guilty of lust in the usual senses burn, and reassured by Virgil that
beyond the fire he will be reunited with Beatrice, soon finds himself
in the earthly paradise, the garden of Eden, located at the very apex of
the mountain. Earlier he had dreamed of Leah and Rachel, and in the
garden he is met by a mysterious woman, Matilda, who sings beauti-
fully. She represents, it would seem, the natural happiness for which
man was originally destined. All that was changed by sin, and the
remedy is the redemption and the promise of a happiness far above
that proportioned to human nature. Hence the Augustinian descrip-
tion of original sin, O felix culpa, since what was lost is as nothing
to what can be gained. Paradise lost is paradise regained, perhaps,
but the meaning of “paradise” has changed. And then, in canto 30,
a veiled Beatrice appears, and Dante turns to find that Virgil is no
longer at his side.
The garden functions as a reminder of the vast difference be-
tween the natural and the supernatural. Virgil, as the representative
of the natural, gives way to Beatrice, having fulfilled the commis-
sion he had accepted from Beatrice when, prompted by St. Lucy,
who was prompted in turn by Mary, she came to him in Limbo.
One misses some acknowledgment here of what the great poet has
done, some gesture of gratitude from Beatrice. But although Dante

weeps at his disappearance, her present concern is to remind Dante
of the transgressions for which his ascent of Mount Purgatory has
been necessary. Earlier, Virgil gave what turns out to be his farewell
address:
. . . “Il temporal foco e l’etterno

veduto hai, figlio; e se’ venuto in parte
dov’ io per me più oltre non discerno.
Tratto t’ho qui con ingegno e con arte;
lo tuo piacere omai prendi per duce;
fuor se’ de l’erte vie, fuor se’ de l’arte.
Vedi lo sol che ’n fronte ti riluce;
vedi l’erbette, i fiori e li arbuscelli
che qui la terra sol da sé produce.
Mentre che vegnan lieti li occhi belli
che, lagrimando, a te venir mi fenno,
seder ti puoi e puoi andar tra elli.
Non aspettar mio dir più né mio cenno;
libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio,
e fallo fora non fare a suo senno:
per ch’io te sovra te corono e mitrio.”
(Purg. 27.127–142)
Son, you’ve seen the temporal and eternal fire and reached the place
where my discernment fails. I have led you here through wit and art.
Now let pleasure be your guide, for you are past the narrow paths.
See the sun that on you shines, look at the grass, the flowers, the
shrubs to which earth here gives birth. Walk among them as you
await those happy loving eyes that wept when she chose me for
your guide. You will get no further word nor sign from me, your
will is free, right, and sane, and it would be wrong to act against it.
Accordingly I place the crown and miter on you.
All the capital P’s have been erased from Dante’s forehead, but his
ordeal is not yet over. Beatrice confronts him with his misbehavior
with the pargoletta, that slip of a girl (Purg. 31.59), who represents, it
seems, more than one companion in dalliance after Beatrice’s death.

And so Dante stands, head bowed like a schoolboy, being scolded
by his beloved. Beatrice is no longer one mortal woman in competi-
tion with others, but the means of Dante’s salvation. To interpret her
initial address to Dante as that of a woman scorned, if only post-
humously, would be to miss the whole point of the Comedy. Sins
are an offense against God and even when forgiven and atoned for,
their memory remains. That is why Dante must be submerged in the
water of Lethe by Matilda. This will be followed by a further bath-
ing in the waters of Eunoe, which prepares him for the last leg of his
journey. The Blessed Virgin is not mentioned in these final cantos of
the Purgatorio, but none of this would have happened without her
initial compassion for the Dante who had gotten himself into that
dark wood.
Beatrice appears to be identified with Mary in the last cantos of
the Purgatorio, or perhaps better, becomes an allegorical figure of
Mary. Far more important, however, is the relationship between the
first woman, resident of the Garden of Eden, and Mary.
Eva/Ave
There is something geographically odd about finding the Garden of

Eden on top of Mount Purgatory. The explanation given is that the
mountain was formed when Lucifer plunged into the earth, burrow-
ing to its very center (the lowest circle of hell), and as he did so, push-
ing an equal volume of dirt out the other side, thus forming Mount
Purgatory. The significance of the Garden is its role now, as Dante, his
soul purged of the stain of the capital sins, comes onto the final stage
of the cantica.
The drama of the Commedia, the whole drama of human life,
began in that garden where our first parents, Adam and Eve, lured
by the promise that they would be as gods if they disobeyed God,
were driven from the earthly paradise into an unfriendly world where
they and their progeny had to earn their bread by the sweat of their
brow. Original sin is that great aboriginal catastrophe, as John Henry
Newman called it, of which we all have some intimation in trying to
understand why we and others act in the wrong and terrible ways we
do.29 Adam and Eve at their creation were untroubled by the division
we are all too aware of in ourselves, with desire contesting with rea-
son, so that we do what we should not and do not do what we should.
How our first parents could have sinned, given their condition and
what theologians call their preternatural gifts, is a problem which,
like that of how angels could sin, we must set aside. (Beatrice, in her
professorial mode, will discuss the angels, good and bad, in Para
diso 29.) If Adam and Eve had not sinned, human history would have
been wholly different. We can lament that fact, but at the same time
we must acknowledge with St. Augustine that the remedy for what
was lost by original sin is more than compensation for it. A Savior
would be sent, the very Son of God, who would reconcile the human
race with the Father. Through him, we would be raised, not just to
the status that was lost, but beyond it, to a supernatural life with the
promise that we will see God even as we are seen.
In the Paradiso 7, we are given the essence of the matter when
Beatrice explains Justinian’s remark that the death of Christ was the
vengeance of God.
Solo il peccato è quel che la disfranca,

e falla dissimìle al sommo bene,
per che del lume suo poco s’imbianca;
e in sua dignità mai non rivene,
se non rïempie, dove colpa vòta,
contra mal dilettar con giuste pene.
Vostra natura, quando peccò tota
nel seme suo, da queste dignitadi,
come di paradiso, fu remota;
né ricovrar potiensi, se tu badi
ben sottilmente, per alcuna via,
sanza passar per un di questi guadi:
o che Dio solo per sua cortesia
dimesso avesse, o che l’uom per sé isso
avesse sodisfatto a sua follia.
Ficca mo l’occhio per entro l’abisso
de l’etterno consiglio, quanto puoi
al mio parlar distrettamente fisso.

Non potea l’uomo ne’ termini suoi
mai sodisfar, per non potere ir giuso
con umiltate obedïendo poi,
quanto disobediendo intese ir suso;
e questa è la cagion per che l’uom fue
da poter sodisfar per sé dischiuoso.
Dunque a Dio convenia con le vie sue
riparar l’omo a sua intera vita,
dico con l’una, o ver con amendue.
Ma perché l’ovra tanto è più gradita
da l’operante, quanto più appresenta
de la bontà del core ond’ ell’ è uscita,
la divina bontà, che ’l mondo imprenta,
di proceder per tutte le sue vie
a rilevarvi suso, fu contenta.
Né tra l’ultima notte e ’l primo die
sì alto o sì magnifico processo,
o per l’una o per l’altra, fu o fie:
ché più largo fu Dio a dar sé stesso
per far l’uom sufficiente a rilevarsi,
che s’elli avesse sol da sé dimesso;
e tutti li altri modi erano scarsi
a la giustizia, se ’l Figliuol di Dio
non fosse umilïato ad incarnarsi.
(Par. 7.79–120)
In Allen Mandelbaum’s translation,
Only man’s sin annuls man’s liberty,

makes him unlike the Highest Good, so that,
in him, the brightness of Its light is dimmed;
and man cannot regain his dignity
unless, where sin left emptiness, man fills
that void with just amends for evil pleasure.
For when your nature sinned so totally
within its seed, then, from these dignities,
just as from Paradise, that nature parted;

and they could never be regained—if you
consider carefully—by any way
that did not pass across one of these fords:
either through nothing other than His mercy,
God had to pardon man, or of himself
man had to proffer payment for his folly.
Now fix your eyes on the profundity
of the Eternal Counsel; heed as closely
as you are able to, my reasoning.
Man, in his limits, could not recompense;
for no obedience, no humility,
he offered later could have been so deep
that it could match the heights he meant to reach
through disobedience; man lacked the power
to offer satisfaction by himself
Thus there was need for God, through His own ways,
to bring man back to life intact—I mean
by one way or by both. But since a deed
pleases its doer more, the more it shows
the goodness of the heart from which it springs,
the Godly Goodness that imprints the world
was happy to proceed through both its ways
to raise you up again. Nor has there been,
nor will there be, between the final night
and the first day, a chain of actions so
lofty and so magnificent as He
enacted when He followed His two ways;
for God showed greater generosity
in giving His own self that man might be
able to rise, than if He simply pardoned;
for every other means fell short of justice,
except the way whereby the Son of God
humbled Himself when he became incarnate.30
The means chosen, the Incarnate God, requires a mother, and this
puts Mary in the very center of the divine plan.
Original sin can make it look as if God’s plan was disrupted by

Adam and Eve, requiring him to rewrite the script and introduce ad
hoc adjustments. It is impossible for us not to think in this way. But
God’s plan did not change. From all eternity, he foresaw original sin
and how he would remedy it. He created Eve to be the mother of
us all, alas, a sinful mother. The Savior who would come, the God
Man, would be born of a human mother, and that mother too was
foreseen from all eternity. Her role as the mother of us all on the
supernatural level was part of the single divine plan. In order for
her to fill that role perfectly, she would be the most perfect of pure
creatures, full of grace, of whom it can be truly said that she is the
mother of God: “Vergine madre, figlia del suo figlio” (Virgin mother,
daughter of your Son [Par. 33.1]). Unless we recognize, with Dante,
that Mary is the most perfect of creatures, the mother of the savior,
who interceded for us with him—as at the wedding feast of Cana;
who dispenses grace surprisingly—as with the deathbed repentant,
Buonconte; who was assumed into heaven, where, body and soul, she
reigns as queen —unless these simple truths are truths for us, we will
never fully appreciate Dante’s attitude toward Mary and her role in
the Commedia. Mary is not merely another human being, a very holy
human being; she is the mother of God, and her maternity is by no
means confined to an event in a cave in Bethlehem long ago. She is
the new Eve, the mother of us all. Nor may we think that this status
is something that we confer on her by our devotion. Her privileges
come from God. Her supereminent role in the economy of salvation
is part of God’s plan, not a human construct.
The earthly paradise at the top of Mount Purgatory is portrayed
in all its natural beauty, but it is empty except for the woman Matilda.
Dante, seeing the setting in which an unfallen mankind had been
meant to dwell, becomes indignant with Eve. Except for her sin and
Adam’s, he would have known these delights long since and for a
longer time. But all this will seem as nothing when Dante is taken on
to the paradise of the new dispensation by Beatrice.
The reunion of Dante and Beatrice is surprising. First of all,
Dante experiences the reaction of a lover: “I felt the mighty power of
old love” (Purg. 33.39). He borrows the line from Virgil’s Aeneid, in
which Aeneas’s backward glance as he sails away from Dido prompts
him to say, “I recognize the signs of an old flame.” Beatrice’s reaction

is surprisingly different. As we have seen, she scolds him, intent on
eliciting his shame for his conduct after her death, his fickleness, and
in any other poem, with any other couple, this might be taken to be
the pique of a woman scorned. But the shame Beatrice wants Dante
to feel—she addresses him somewhat abruptly as “Dante” (Purg.
30.55)—is for turning away from from the object to which his love for
her was meant to lead him. Beatrice’s attendants ask why she shames
her old lover so, and she answers at length:
Alcun tempo il sostenni col mio volto:

mostrando li occhi giovanetti a lui,
meco il menava in dritta parte vòlto.
Sì tosto come in su la soglia fui
di mia seconda etade e mutai vita,
questi si tolse a me, e diessi altrui.
Quando di carne a spirto era salita
e bellezza e virtù cresciuta m’era,
fu’ io a lui men cara e men gradita;
e volse i passi suoi per via non vera,
imagini di ben seguendo false,
che nulla promession rendono intera.
Né l’impetrare ispirazion mi valse,
con le quali e in sogno e altrimenti
lo rivocai: sì poco a lui ne calse!
(Purg. 30.121–135)
My countenance sustained him for a while;

showing my youthful eyes to him, I led
him with me toward the way of righteousness.
As soon as I, upon the threshold of
my second age, had changed my life, he took
himself away from me and followed after
another; when from flesh to spirit, I
had risen, and my goodness and my beauty
had grown, I was less dear to him, less welcome:
he turned his footsteps toward an untrue path;
he followed counterfeits of goodness, which

will never pay in full what they have promised.
Nor did the inspirations I received—
and which, in dreams and otherwise, I called
him back—help me; he paid so little heed.
(trans. Mandelbaum)31
In short, we are given a reprise of the whole basis for Dante’s jour-
ney. He had sunk so low that the only means of bringing him back was
to show him the horrors of hell and the pains of purgatory. In recount-
ing how she went down to the gateway of the dead to provide Dante
with the guide who has brought him at last to her, Beatrice makes no
mention of her need to be prompted by St. Lucy, who had been stirred
to action by the Blessed Virgin, but the reader will remember the ulti-
mate aegis under which everything is taking place.
Between the earthly paradise and the ascent to Paradise, history
intervenes: Dante puts before us a complicated pageant, rich with al-
legory, summing up the history of mankind and the plight that he
judges the Church to be in. Having been chided like a schoolboy and
reduced to tears for his sins, Dante is ready to drink from the rivers of
Lethe and Eunoe, after which “I was pure and prepared to climb unto
the stars” (Purg. 33.145, trans. Mandelbaum).
FOUR
Queen of Heaven
L’ombra del beato regno: The shadow of the blessed realm
In the final cantica of the Commedia, Beatrice and Dante fall upward,
as it were. The highest good draws them magnetically—gravitas de-
fies gravity—because of Beatrice’s sanctity and the purging of Dante
that has taken place as he clambered up Mount Purgatory.
How could any poet depict in words and their accompanying im-
ages what escapes all sensible representation? Dante seems to have
assigned himself an impossible task. One solution is to call attention
to the difficulty and, by addressing it, resolve it if only obliquely. But
how does one express the ineffable except by words? Even “inex-
pressible” is a word. And our language comes trailing its origins in
our sense experience. Take any word that is applied to an immaterial
reality, let alone to God: it has been drawn from its native habitat,
the realm of things proportionate to our knowledge, and made to
serve a higher purpose than thinking and talking about the change-
able things of this world. Soul? Its original meaning is breath, wind.
Father, good, one, intelligent, powerful, actual—the entire vocabulary
of the theologian is anchored, one way or another, in the sensible
101
world. This extrapolation of words, this extension of their meaning, is

justified because the sensible world is a sign of and a means of know-
ing its cause. In this sense, the very means that Dante uses, namely
language, contains the solution of his dilemma.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Dante employs the planets of
our system to represent degrees of beatitude. Beatrice will fly him
to the moon and then to Mercury and all the rest, until, beyond
these wheeling spheres, they reach the celestial empyrean, which is
wholly immaterial and thus not a place. On the upward journey, dur-
ing layovers on the various planets, Dante encounters the souls of
the blessed, first those of the least degree and then upward through
more intense participation in the divine goodness. No soul regards its
measure of happiness as inadequate; even if it is aware of the greater
beatitude of other souls, it has no desire for more. We can compare
this to glasses of different capacity, each full to the brim. But although
the various spheres and their differing proximity from the fixed
stars provide a means for Dante to represent degrees of beatitude,
we should not conclude that some blessed souls are caught up in the
lunar sphere, others in the sphere of Mercury, Venus, and so on. The
physical hierarchy of planets represents a spiritual hierarchy.
The ascending scale of blessedness is as follows: represented on
the moon—although all the blessed are actually in the celestial rose—
are those who were inconstant in vows; on Mercury, those who were
ambitious in the active life; on Venus, the great lovers; on the Sun,
the great theologians and other teachers; on Mars, the warriors; on
Jupiter, the just; on Saturn, the contemplatives; in the heaven of the
fixed stars, Dante will witness the triumph of Christ, the Virgin Mary,
and will meet Adam and saints Peter, James, and John. In the ninth
heaven Dante has a vision of the angelic hierarchy and then, in the
tenth heaven, the empyrean, a vision of the celestial rose, the dwelling
place of all the blessed, which is presided over by Mary, the Queen of
Heaven. Only by images and words whose origins are in our common
experience could Dante put before our eyes what cannot be seen and
utter the ineffable.
The reader is permitted to think of this ascension, this astral
journey, in more or less literal terms. After all, Dante still has a body,
even if he needs no space suit or other provisions for an atmosphere
Queen of Heaven 103
different from the terrestrial. But we are given two precious downward
glimpses as Dante and his beloved soar upward, first in Paradiso 22:
Col viso ritornai per tutte quante

le sette spere, e vidi questo globo
tal, ch’io sorrisi del suo vil sembiante;
e quel consiglio per migliore approbo
che l’ha per meno; e chi ad altro pensa
chiamar si puote veramente probo.
(Par. 22.133–138)
My eyes returned through all those seven spheres and I saw this
globe in such a way that I smiled at its sorry appearance; I endorse
that judgment as best which holds it least, and one whose thoughts
go elsewhere can truly be called virtuous.
The second downward look, in canto 27, also conveys the mod-
esty of earth among the swirling planets. If the earth is the center in
this view of the planets, if geocentrism holds, yet that centrality does
not grant it prominence. A reader who has been struck by the pre-
science of the air flight to Rome in Robert Hugh Benson’s 1903 novel
Lord of the World will be all the more awed by Dante’s anticipation
of today’s marvelous photographs of earth taken from outer space.
Such a small thing. And yet it is central in another way: earth is where
men live and where the drama of their salvation was enacted. Dante’s
reader can never be so starstruck as to forget this.
Mane e sera: Morning and evening
The Blesssed Virgin may seem to be absent from the first two-thirds of
the Paradiso, but to think so would be to forget the goal toward which
Dante and Beatrice are rising. In canto 23, Christ and His mother
become central. It is fitting that we enter upon what will prove to be
a cumulative concentration on Mary by noting the role of Dante’s
personal devotion to her, which complements the recognition of the
universal role of the Mother of God.
Il nome del bel fior ch’io sempre invoco

e mane e sera, tutto mi ristrinse
l’animo ad avvisar lo maggior foco.
(Par. 23.88–90)
The name of that beautiful flower that every morning and evening
I invoke, drew my entire soul and reminded me of the greater focus.
This passage is not the sole instance of Dante’s devotion and

piety.1 In a narrow sense of the term “autobiographical,” this is the
only explicitly autobiographical reference to Dante’s spiritual life in
the Comedy. But to suggest that only here can we discern Dante’s per-
sonal devotion to Mary would be akin to concluding that since Dante
is addressed by name only once, by Beatrice in canto 30 of the Pur-
gatorio, we are in some doubt as to the identity of the narrator of the
poem. For all that, this explicit reference to daily Marian devotions is
a charming revelation; we think of Dante at dawn and dusk, e mane
e sera, invoking Mary’s protection during his day and night. Did he
perhaps recite the Angelus?2 It is appealing to think so, since that
prayer lingers over the words spoken by Gabriel and Mary at the An-
nunication. We should not overrate the significance of e mane et sera,
but we should not underrate it, either. It is a memorable statement of
Dante’s devotion to the Blessed Mother.
After Paradiso 23 we come to the three cantos where Dante will
confess his faith, express his hope, and declare his love. But first, let
us consider the setting of canto 23. Dante and Beatrice have come up
through the seven spheres of the planets and have arrived at the eighth
heaven, the sphere of the fixed stars. There are two heavens above this
realm, but they, unlike the planetary spheres and the heaven of the
fixed stars, are invisible. In short, with the heaven of the fixed stars we
have reached the boundary between the visible and invisible. Along
the way, Dante and Beatrice have met with representatives of the enor-
mous number of the blessed, whose true “location” is the celestial em-
pyrean, heaven proper, which is beyond any reference to astronomical
place. Almost immediately, Dante notices the expression of intense
expectancy on Beatrice’s face. The opening lines of canto 23 liken her
attitude to that of a mother bird just before daylight.
Queen of Heaven 105
Come l’augello, intra l’amate fronde,

posato al nido de’ suoi dolci nati
la notte che le cose ci nasconde,
che, per veder li aspetti disïati
e per trovar lo cibo onde li pasca,
in che gravi labor li sono aggrati,
previene il tempo in su aperta frasca,
e con ardente affetto il sole aspetta,
fiso guardando pur che l’alba nasca;
così la donna mïa stava eretta
e attenta . . .
(Par. 23.1–11)
Like a mother bird who has rested with her dear little ones among
the branches during the night that hides all things, eager to see her
longed-for chicks again and find food with which to feed them, a
heavy task that pleases her, she awaits the sun with ardent love,
waiting for dawn to break—so did my lady stand tall and watchful.
Beatrice tells Dante that what appears before them are the troops
of the triumphant Christ. A description of Beatrice’s expectant face
continues, but then the sun appears, brighter than a thousand lamps
that draw their light from that sun. Dante is beholding the Wisdom
and Power, the one who opened the longed-for path between earth and
heaven. The canto continues with Dante’s description of his defective
memory of this moment, and of the continuing difficulty of describing
such indescribable things: “And thus, in representing Paradise, the sa-
cred poem has to jump across, as does a man who finds his path cut off ”
(Par. 23.61–63). Dante is recalled from such ruminations by Beatrice.
“Perché la faccia mia sì t’innamora,

che tu non ti rivolgi al bel giardino
che sotto i raggi di Cristo s’infiora?
Quivi è la rosa in che ’l verbo divino
carne si fece; quivi son li gigli
al cui odor si prese il buon cammino.”
(Par. 23.70–75)
“Why are you so fascinated with my face that you do not turn and
look at the beautiful garden flourishing under the sun of Christ?
There is the Rose in which the divine word became flesh, and the
scent of lilies that enable men to find the right path.”
Christ’s entry into the poem is accompanied by that of His

Mother. The blessed are depicted as a garden irradiated by the light
of Christ, and chief among those flowers is Mary, the mystical rose,
the mother of God. She is the celestial rose. Now Dante sees a torch-
like light descend and form a crown like a ring, a garland revolving
around Mary. It is an angel, the angel of the Annunciation.
“Io sono amore angelico, che giro

l’alta letizia che spira nel ventre
che fu albergo del nostro disiro;
e girerommi, donna del ciel, mentre
che seguirai tuo figlio, e farai dia
più la spera supprema perché lì entre.”
(Par. 23.103–108)
I am the angelic love who turns about that exalted happiness that
breathes from the womb where dwelt our Desire; so shall I circle,
Lady of Heaven, until, following your Son, you have made that
sphere yet more divine by entering it.
At this, all the blessed sing out the name of Mary as Christ and
His mother rise triumphantly, and Dante is made aware of the deep
affection all of them have for Mary. The blessed then burst into the
song “Regina celi,” the antiphon of Eastertide:
Regina coeli, laetare, alleluia!

Quia quem meruisti portare
Resurrexit, sicut dixit, alleluia!
Queen of heaven, rejoice, alleleuia! Because He whom you merited

to bear has risen as he said he would, alleluia!3
Queen of Heaven 107
The tenderness of the song, Dante tells us, was such that the memory
of it never left him.
The ascension of Christ and Mary is preparation for what is to
come, a foretaste of the culminating vision that will be granted later
to Dante when he is taken up to the ninth and tenth heavens by Bea-
trice. But first he must undergo an examination in the theological
virtues. Meanwhile, his appetite has been whetted by his vision of the
triumphant Christ:
Quivi trïunfa, sotto l’alto Filio

di Dio e di Maria, di sua vittoria,
e con l’antico e col novo concilio,
colui che tien le chiavi di tal gloria.
(Par. 23.136–139)
Here, just below the high Son of God and Mary, he who is the
keeper of the keys to glory triumphs in his victory together with
the ancient and new councils.
This concluding reference to St. Peter, keeper of the keys, draws atten-
tion to the fact that the assembly of the blessed represents the Church
Triumphant under the leadership of Peter. St. Peter will play a central
role in the next canto.
If we look back on the opening lines of canto 23, the description of
the mother bird anxious about her young, we see an inescapable refer-
ence to Mary. It is bracketed by the closing image of the throng of the
blessed, lifting their arms longingly to her as she ascends. Dante com-
pares them to an infant who, just after having been fed, extends its arms
to its mother. The deep affection of all the blessed for Mary is filial.
Io credo in uno Dio: I believe in one God
In canto 24, Beatrice presents Dante to the assembled spirits. She

notes that he is still in an earthly condition but is to be given a fore-
taste of the banquet that is their eternal sustenance. At this, a spirit
detaches himself from the rest, and Beatrice identifies him as St.
Peter. Beatrice asks Peter to test Dante’s faith.
This canto and the two following it have often been compared to
an academic examination and are called the doctrinal cantos. St. Peter
examines Dante on the theology of faith, St. James on the theology of
hope, and St. John on the theology of love. But what we are given is
both like and unlike an exchange between master and pupil, at least
if this is understood as an abstract and impersonal presentation of a
subject matter. What we witness, and what is elicited from Dante by
his three apostolic interlocutors, are professions of faith, of hope, and
of love. Here Dante lays bare what governs his life, the three theologi-
cal virtues of faith, hope, and charity that are peculiar to Christianity
and beyond the ken of pagan morality. They are the conditions for en-
joying the beatific vision. Of course, the tendency to read the doctrinal
cantos as a series of objective presentations is prompted by Dante’s
own words: “Just as the bachelor candidate must arm himself and does
not speak until the master asks the question for discussion—for ap-
proval, not to conclude it—so while she spoke I armed myself with all
my arguments, preparing for such a questioner and such professing”
(Par. 24.46–51). And the first question put to him by St. Peter is, What
is faith? No doubt there is an initial similarity to a scholarly examina-
tion, but that should not obscure the truly remarkable personal pro-
fession of this “candidate.” Imagine him speaking thus in an ordinary
academic oral exam—the difference leaps out at us.
Earlier, Peter had been identified as keeper of the keys, the head of
the Church, but here, reference is made to his response to Jesus when
he got out of the boat and tried to walk on water (Matt. 14:28–31). That
is, Peter here is not the glorified saint but the Peter whose faith faltered
as he walked upon the water, causing him to sink, and the Peter who
denied Christ. Here, Peter is addressing a Dante who is still in the
condition that the saint was on earth.
The examination began with the question, What is faith? Dante
proceeds to quote St. Paul from Hebrews: “Faith is the substance of
things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.”4 That, Dante says in
perfect Scholastic mode, is the quiddity of faith. “Why substance?”
Peter then asks, and “Why evidence?” Dante’s reply to the first is,
“The profound things that bestow their image on me here are hidden
Queen of Heaven 109
from sight below, so that what they are lies in faith alone, and the
highest hope is based on that faith; and so it is that faith is called a
substance” (Par. 24.70–74). And what of “evidence”?
E da questa credenza ci convene

silogizzar, sanz’ avere altra vista:
però intenza d’argomento tene.
(Par. 24.75–78)
From this faith it is meet that we begin to reason, although seeing

no more; so faith is called an evidence.
So far, we seem indeed to be listening to a degree candidate being

examined in a purely academic way. That what Dante is engaged in
here is more a confession of faith than an account of it, however, is
clear when we look at a thoroughly magisterial treatment of the sub-
ject, such as that of Thomas Aquinas.
In his commentary on Hebrews 11:1, “Faith is the substance of
things to be hoped for, the existence of things that are not seen,”
Thomas states that this definition of faith is complete but obscure.5
In the Disputed Questions on Truth (De ver.), q. 14, a. 2, he puts it this
way: This expression is the most perfect and complete definition of
faith, but it is not expressed in the proper form of a definition. The
proper form is to give the genus into which the nature of the thing in
question fits, and its specific difference from other generically simi-
lar things. But, Thomas adds, it is easy to put this definition into the
usual proper form—and that is what he goes about doing. Everything
that is needed for a formal definition is provided in Paul’s remark.
There are three indications that this is so.
First, all the principles on which the essence of faith depends are
given in the statement from Hebrews. Earlier, Thomas had stressed
the crucial role of will in the act of faith; but will is moved by its ob-
ject, which is the known desirable good, the end. For faith, two things
are needed: the good moving the will; and that to which the intellect
assents.
“There is a twofold ultimate good of man which first moves the will
as its ultimate end” (De ver., q. 14, a. 2).6 Two ultimate goods act as our
ultimate end. One is proportioned to our nature and can be attained

by natural efforts, namely, the happiness of which philosophers speak,
whether contemplative or practical. The other is a good that exceeds
human nature, for the attaining of which natural powers are insuffi-
cient. But we cannot be ordered to an end unless there is in us some
proportion to that end; that is, the loved is always similar to the lover.
With respect to the first ultimate good, we have a certain incho-
ative grasp of it, namely, in the first self-evident principles that are
the seeds of theoretical and practical reasoning, as well as a natural
desire for this good. There must be something analogous in the case
of the ultimate good that exceeds our nature. The ultimate happiness,
according to the philosophers, consists in such knowledge of God as
we can attain by our natural powers. This is knowledge of God from
His effects. But in the supernatural order we are called to a complete
knowledge of God: “This is eternal life, that they might know thee,
the one true God” (John 17:3). Faith is the name of that beginning in
us of the complete knowledge of God. But in anything that has parts,
the most fundamental part, the beginning of the whole, is called its
substance. Thus faith, insofar as it is the beginning of eternal life,
which we hope for on the basis of the divine promise, is called “the
substance of things hoped for.”
The assent of intellect to what is proposed to it—here, the articles
of faith—is dependent on a movement of will, because the object in this
case is not obviously true. In the usual case of assent, the mind grasps
what is clear to it, proportioned to its natural powers, and goes on to
argue from that truth to other truths. Similarly, the obscure things
assented to in the act of faith are the basis on which arguments are
formed. Hence, faith is the “argument for things which do not appear.”
Thomas sums up: we are given the matter or object of faith,
which is unseen (non apparentium); its act, in that it is an argument
(argumentum); and the order to the end, in that it is the substance of
things hoped for (substantia rerum sperandarum). The genus is given
by its act, namely, a habit that is known from its act, and by its subject,
mind—and that suffices. “Thus from what we are given it is easy to
construct a well-formed definition of it; ‘faith is a habit of mind by
which eternal life begins in us and which causes the intellect to assent
to what is not obvious’ ” (De ver. q. 14, a. 2).
Queen of Heaven 111
In his commentary on Hebrews, Thomas compares intellectual

assent in natural learning with the assent of faith.7 It is true that the
mind normally assents to something because it sees it is so, and the
process of arriving at this assent begins with a desire to know what
a discipline promises. Any student must begin with a desire to know
what is promised by the discipline and of which, of course, he or she
is still ignorant. What is promised is thus seen as a good, something
desirable, and the student’s desire drives the intellect toward the ac-
quisition of knowledge. Hence the adage, oportet addiscentem cre-
dere: the learner must believe. But the belief invoked in this example
is human faith, that is, our trust in the teacher, and it is the start of a
process that should end in our knowing on our own.8 But although
this likens divine faith to the trust and hope that is involved in any
intellectual inquiry, the difference between the two is vast. Supernat-
ural faith lasts as long as life does; it is only beyond our earthly life
that the promised full knowledge will be obtained. Meanwhile, we
see as in a glass darkly. In his commentary on Hebrews, just as in the
Disputed Questions on Truth, Thomas also points out that divine faith
differs from every other kind of mental act—from scientific knowl-
edge, human faith, opinion, doubt, and conjecture.9
Once Peter has been assured that Dante can provide the quid-
dity, or the definition, of faith and can explain what enters into that
definition, the exchange alters profoundly. “Do you have it in your
purse?” Peter asks. That is to say, All right, you know what faith is,
you have just explained it, but do you have it? The exchange may have
continued for a time before being kicked into a first-person confes-
sional form, but we sense that Peter and Dante are not discussing
some interesting abstraction. Faith comes from the word of God and
from miracles attesting to its veracity.
St. Peter declares himself satisfied with Dante’s answers, “but now
you must declare what you believe and what gave you the faith that
you receive.” And so we come to Dante’s credo:
E io rispondo: Io credo in uno Dio

solo ed etterno, che tutto ’l ciel move,
non moto, con amore e con disio;
e a tal creder non ho io pur prove
fisice e metafisice, ma dalmi

anche la verità che quinci piove
per Moïsè, per profeti e per salmi,
per l’Evangelio e per voi che scriveste
poi che l’ardente Spirto vi fé almi;
e credo in tre persone etterne, e queste
credo una essenza sì una e sì trina,
che soffera congiunto ‘sono’ ed ‘este.’
De la profonda condizion divina
ch’io tocco mo, la mente mi sigilla
più volte l’evangelica dottrina.
I answer: I believe in one God—sole,

eternal—He who, motionless, moves all
the heavens with His love and His desire;
for this belief I have not only proofs
both physical and metaphysical;
I also have the truth that here rains down
through Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms
and through the Gospels and through you who wrote
words given to you by the Holy Ghost.
And I believe in three Eternal Persons,
and these I do believe to be one essence,
so single and threefold as to allow
both is and are. Of this profound condition
of God that I have touched on, Gospel teaching
has often set the imprint on my mind.
(Par. 24.130–144, trans. Mandelbaum)
The first five lines express Dante’s belief in God as the Prime
Mover, about which doctrine he says he has physical and metaphysi-
cal proofs; then comes the assurance of Scripture. Personal as this
testimony is, it also attests to Dante’s months of study in Florence, as
he prepared himself for his great task.
The truths about God that can be discovered by natural reason—
that He exists, that He is one, that He is cause of all else, and the
like—are of course implicit in the articles of the Nicene Creed. But
the “preambles of faith” are not articles of faith and therefore do
Queen of Heaven 113
not as such enter into the creed.10 Dante’s profession of belief in the
Trinity of Persons in God takes slightly over three lines, but this
belief, unlike belief in God, rests entirely on the teaching of the
Gospels.
Dante’s creed, when compared to the Athanasian Creed, to the
Apostle’s Creed, or to the Nicene Creed, is pretty minimalist. There is
a God, who is a Trinity of Persons. No mention is made of the things
hoped for, of the Virgin Birth, or of the passion and death of Christ.
Of course, Dante’s credo here does not exhaust his faith—no creed is
exhaustive—but what he professes here can be supplemented from
the poem as a whole.
Uno attender certo de la gloria futura: A sure expectation of future glory
No doubt it is fitting that a canto dedicated to the virtue of hope

(canto 25) should begin with Dante’s wistful dream of returning to
Florence, ending his long exile from his native city, and being granted
the laurel crown for his sacred poem in the baptistry where his life
of faith began. St. Peter himself has garlanded Dante’s brow after his
confession of faith. Of course, Florence did not follow suit. The sa-
cred poem is drawing to its end—there are only a few cantos to go—
but Dante will continue to eat the bread of others and climb the stairs
of houses not his own.
Se mai continga che ’l poema sacro

al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra,
sì che m’ha fatto per molto anni macro,
vinca la crudeltà che fuor mi serra
del bello ovile ov’ io dormi’ agnello,
nimico ai lupi che li danno guerra;
con altra voce omai, con altro vello
ritornerò poeta, e in sul fonte
del mio battesmo prenderò ’l cappello;
però che ne la fede, che fa conte
l’anime a Dio, quivi intra’ io, e poi
Pietro per lei sì mi girò la fronte.
(Par. 25.1–12)
Should this sacred poem, to which both heaven and earth have lent
a hand and which over the years has left me lean, ever overcome the
cruelty that keeps me from that fair fold in which as a lamb I slept,
a lamb opposed by wolves that war on it, then with other voice and
other fleece shall I return and at my baptismal font put on the laurel
crown; there I first found entry to the faith that reconciles souls with
God and for which Peter wreathed my brow.
After this melancholy prelude, the canto takes on its special mean-
ing with the arrrival of a flame, circling like a dove and then alighting.
This is the soul of St. James, identified by reference to his burial place
in Compostela, a major object of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages and
now. As before, modo academico, Dante is asked by the apostle “to
tell what hope is, tell how it has blossomed within your mind” (Par.
25.46–47). Again, a duality: Dante must give an account of the virtue
itself and also how he personally acquired it. But before he can begin,
Beatrice intervenes, assuring St. James that there is “no child of the
Church Militant who has more hope than he has” (Par. 25.52–53). That
said, she leaves to Dante the response to St. James’s two questions:
“Spene,” diss’ io, “è uno attendar certo

de la gloria futura, il qual produce
grazia divina e precedente merto.”
(Par. 25.67–69)
I said, “Hope is a certain expectation of future glory, produced by

grace and preceding merit.”
In response to this, James declares that he still burns with love “for
the virtue that was mine until my martyrdom and departure from
the field” (Par. 25.82–83). The sources of Dante’s hope are to be found
in Holy Writ, as he explains, whereupon the blessed cry out “Sperent
in te,” They hope in you. This verse from Psalm 9:11 has already been
cited by Dante in speaking of the sources of his hope, and now it is
echoed by the blessed.
Toward the end of the canto, St. John arrives on the scene, an-
nounced by Beatrice in a pithy tercet.
Queen of Heaven 115
“Questi è colui che giacque sopra ’l petto

del nostro pellicano, e questi fue
di su la croce al grande officio eletto.”
(Par. 25.112–114)
This is he who laid his head upon the breast of Christ our pelican
and, from the cross, was chosen for a grand task.
What is the grande officio assigned to John by Jesus on the Cross?

“Then when Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved
standing there, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold thy son,’ and
then he said to the disciple, ‘Behold thy mother.’ And from that mo-
ment on the disciple took her into his household” (John 19:26–27).
The care of the Blessed Virgin fell to John, and she was with him for
the rest of her life. Mary thus enters obliquely into the discussion.
There is more, however. John, noticing that Dante is peering at him as
if to get a better look, makes it clear that his own body has been con-
signed to earth and will remain there until the dead are raised. Dante
is here addressing a legend that John had been assumed both body
and soul into heaven. Not so, says the one who would know. There
are only two presently in heaven as both body and soul, and they are
Jesus and His Blessed Mother.
Con le due stole nel beato chiostro

son le due luci sole che saliro;
e questo apporterai nel mondo vostro.
(Par. 25.127–129)
Only two lights have risen to our blessed choir with two robes: tell
this to the world.
Dante thus affirms the assumption of Mary at a time when even St.
Thomas considered it at most a possibility. Eventually, in 1950, the
assumption of Mary was declared de fide, infallible dogma. The idea
that it was fitting for the body of this most faithful one not to undergo
corruption, much discussed before the declaration, thus became a
settled truth of Catholic belief.11
Of the three theological virtues, only the third, charity, remains.

After this life there is no further need for faith—its enigmatic knowl-
edge gives way to vision—or of hope, since what was hoped for is
now had. Dante’s condition is still mortal, so he must exhibit his pos-
session of all three virtues before he can be taken up into the highest
heaven, where he will be granted a brief and privileged glimpse of
things to come.
Filosofici argomenti e autorità
When Dante is being examined by St. John on charity, he states that

love is imprinted on him “by philosophic arguments and by authority,”
and St. John repeats the phrase with obvious approval. Earlier, re-
sponding to St. Peter on faith, Dante had pointed to a syllogism that
shows that faith is true (Par. 24.94). And in his credo, Dante insists
that for beliefs in the first five lines, consisting of truths about God as
Prime Mover, “I have not only proofs both physical and metaphysical”
but revelation as well. St. John sums up Dante’s position thus:
E io udi’: “Per intelletto umano

e per autoritadi a lui concorde
d’i tuoi amori a Dio guarda il sovrano.”
(Par. 26.46–48)
And I heard, “By means of the human intellect and authority in

concord with it, the highest of your loves to God will go.”
Such passages do not prepare us for Beatrice’s diatribe against

the reasoning of the schools, which we find in canto 29. In the previ-
ous canto she had compared the theologies of (Pseudo-)Denis the
Areopagite and Gregory the Great on the angelic hierarchies, indicat-
ing that Denis had it right and that when Gregory arrived in paradise,
he smiled at his own earthly error. But this is only to point out that
sometimes reasoning turns out well and sometimes it doesn’t. There
is far more at issue in canto 29. The reasoning of the schools is char-
acterized as confused and ambiguous. And worse.
Queen of Heaven 117
Voi non andate giù per un sentiero

filosofando: tanto vi trasporta
l’amor de l’apparenza e ’l suo pensiero!
E ancor questo qua sù si comporta
con men disdegno che quando è posposta
la divina Scrittura o quando è torta.
(Par. 29.85–90)
You do not follow a single path when you philosophize down

there—love of showing off and of your own thinking! Yet all that
ostentation is disdained less here than when Sacred Scripture is
distorted or subordinated.
The specific problem under consideration here is the number of

the angels, but the criticism does not seem limited to that particular
issue. And there is also Beatrice’s disdainful reference to Dante’s stud-
ies in Florence. What is Dante’s teaching on the relationship between
faith and reason, between faith and the desire to understand? Is there
a division of opinion between him and Beatrice?
In the case of the first part of his credo, Dante has been taken to
be referring to such proofs as the quinque viae of Thomas Aquinas,
the five ways of proving the existence of God from premises that ex-
press truths about the world around us, truths available to any human
person. This is, of course, an appeal to a theological work, the Summa
theologiae. The question arises, what effect does the theological set-
ting have on the so-called natural reasoning? Thomas himself coined
a phrase to name truths about God that can be established by “physi-
cal and metaphysical” reasoning. He called them praeambula fidei,
preambles of faith. He never provides an exhaustive list of these pre-
ambles, most often settling for such a list as “God exists,” “There is
only one God,” and the like. Thomas found the proofs in Aristotle’s
Physics (books 7 and 8) and Metaphysics (book 12) cogent and em-
ployed them in his Summa. But these, and all other truths about God,
Thomas Aquinas, as a believer, would have held long before he was
capable of formulating or assessing a philosophical proof of them. In
short, the truths about God that philosophers can and have proved
are included among the truths about God that have been revealed.
Before the believer knows (by way of a philosophical proof) that God
exists, he or she believes it. By calling such truths preambles of faith,
Thomas is comparing them to faith, a comparison that only a theolo-
gian, not an ancient philosopher, would make. Does this render the
relationship between the known and believed hopelessly ambiguous?
When Thomas says that there are two kinds of truth about God,
those that can be known to be such and those that in this life can only
be believed, he speaks of both of them as what “we profess.”12 Dante
is clearly influenced by Thomas’s claim that there are philosophical
proofs of some of the truths about God that have been revealed. If phi-
losophers of old could prove such truths, so can philosophers of any
time, believers or not. We might wonder what interest believers would
have in finding proofs for things they already hold to be true. We might
further wonder, if we are like Thomas Aquinas, why God would in-
clude within revelation certain truths about Himself that can be known
separately, and thus need not be believed on the basis of faith.13
The fact is that holding truths on the basis of faith is not a natu-
ral mode of the human mind. When we trust one another for some
truth, this may be a mere expedient. I take your word that Beijing is
a foggy city, and then I go there and know this to be true. The pre-
ambles of faith are like that. But what about all the other truths that
have been revealed and are believed and that cannot in this life be
known? Those are the mysteries of faith, the articles of faith. Do we
just acknowledge that we cannot comprehend and fall silent?
St. Anselm’s maxim fides quaerens intellectum—faith seeking
understanding—has often been taken as the charter for believers pon-
dering the mysteries of faith. That effort is distinguished from philo-
sophical efforts, since the latter issue in knowledge. But the mysteries
of the faith—the Incarnation, the Trinity, the forgiveness of sins, and
so on—however much we reflect on them, compare them to knowl-
edge, and defend them against the charge of incoherence, nonethe-
less resist our efforts to comprehend them. So long as we are alive,
the only basis for holding the mysteries to be true is because God has
revealed them. They are something the Church teaches us. Unlike the
theology of the philosophers, which is the culminating achievement
of philosophy, the theology based on Sacred Scripture, on revelation,
always remains in a sense a learned ignorance, a docta ignorantia.
Queen of Heaven 119
No wonder, then, that Thomas welcomes the results of philo-

sophical theology, which he dubs the preambles of faith. They sug-
gest the following argument for the reasonableness of faith, that is,
the reasonableness of accepting as true what we cannot in this life
know to be true. If some of the truths that have been revealed—the
preambles—can be known to be true, this suggests that the whole
of revelation consists of intelligible truths, truths that will be under-
stood and grasped as true in the next world.
But why would the preambles be revealed? If they are know-
able by our own efforts, why not simply trust people to learn them
through natural reasoning and then go on to relate them to the mys-
teries of the faith? Despite his robust confidence in the range of rea-
son, and despite his obvious admiration of Aristotle for having come
to such knowledge of God as he could derive from his knowledge of
the world, Thomas nonetheless holds that the human race would be
in real trouble if those naturally knowable truths about God were not
immediately available to all through revelation.14 The theology of the
philosophers is a difficult achievement; metaphysical proofs of God’s
existence, however cogent, are subject to endless discussion.
Dante’s expression of confidence in the range of reason matches
that of Thomas Aquinas. He is certainly not suggesting that the mys-
teries of faith can be established by philosophical argumentation, and
his suggestion that even the truths that can be established by reason
are corroborated by revelation is consistent with Thomas’s view. This
little dispute, to the degree that it is one, calls attention to a premise
essential to Dante and the Commedia, namely, the compatibility of
the natural and the supernatural and the complementarity of the best
of reason and the mysteries of the faith.
Maior ex his est caritas: The greatest of these is love
The three theological virtues have God for their object, the God
in whom one believes, the God for whom one hopes, and the God
with whom one is eternally united in love. “There remain then these
three, faith, hope, and charity, and the greatest of these is charity.”
With these words the magnificent chapter 13 of the First Epistle to
the Corinthians ends. This being so, we might expect that St. John’s
examination of Dante on charity would be the most thorough of all.
Actually, it is the briefest. St. John makes his appearance in canto 25,
where his brilliance blinds Dante, a condition in which Dante re-
mains until the examination is over.
In his response to John, Dante gives credit to Beatrice for awak-
ening love in him (Par. 26.15). The alpha and omega of sacred writ-
ings, he continues, links love and the good.
E io: “Per filosofici argomenti

e per autorità che quinci scende
cotale amor convien che in me si imprenti:
ché ’l bene, in quanto ben, come s’intende,
così accende amore, e tanto maggio
quanto più di bontate in sé comprende.”
(Par. 26.25–30)
And I answered, “By means of philosophical arguments and by the

authority that descends from here, that love was impressed upon me.
For the good as such, once understood, thus enkindles love, and all
the more the more goodness in itself is understood.”
We have already considered this blend of philosophical and au-

thoritative (i.e., scriptural) bases for Dante’s conception of the primacy
of love. The cosmos is an ordered whole, and each thing in it naturally
seeks its good. A thing can be directed to a good only if knowledge
of that good is had, and for most things in the cosmos the knowledge
involved in their natural appetites is not their own but their maker’s.
They fly to their assigned ends like an arrow to the target. Other cos-
mic entities have sense knowledge, and this is antecedent to their pur-
suit of pleasures and pains, the two being signs as to whether the thing
sought is good or bad for the seeker. With humans a whole new realm
opens up, involving intelligence and thus the capacity to grasp good-
ness as such and to direct ourselves to our true good.
We pointed out earlier that we are rational animals; that is, we
have bodies and share many appetites and drives with brute animals;
for that matter, we share properties with plants and even inanimate
Queen of Heaven 121
nature. We also have drives and appetites that follow more or less au-
tomatically on sense perception. But the human task is not to put one’s
mind to the more efficient or satisfying attainment of food and drink
and sexual pleasure. These undeniable goods are parts of the human
good insofar as they are ordered by and amenable to rational direc-
tion to one’s overall good. The understood good, the object of intel-
ligence, triggers that appetite we call will. Will is a natural appetite, to
the extent that we cannot not will the good. Our task is to order other
goods to that end, and here we may succeed or fail. Our animal ap-
petites are at war with our pursuit of the rationally recognized good.
We naturally and necessarily want our comprehensive good, the
end that is ultimate because, once obtained, there is nothing further
to desire. In that sense, we can say that there is one single end for all
human agents. But the drama arises from the fact that we identify that
ultimate end with objects that can scarcely fulfill our expectations.
Pleasure, wealth, power, fame—these and other objects have been
put forward as identical with our ultimate end. If this were merely
an intellectual problem, a misidentification that can be dealt with by
argument, life would be simpler. As it is, we reveal our identification
of lesser and evanescent goods and the ultimate end in our actions
far more than in our theories. And in action, our emotions and pas-
sions are involved; we become habituated to seek, say, sense pleasure.
It takes more than a convincing argument if we are to change our
ways. It involves a struggle, the schooling of our sense appetite to
respond to the true good. This is a struggle in which we need the help
of friends, the support of the community in which we live, and, above
all, God’s grace.
No one becomes good by studying philosophy, Aristotle wrote.
He meant that pondering about the good at a level of abstraction
can never as such alter the condition of our appetite. The good that
we would, we do not, and the good that we would not, we pursue.
The paradox of human action is contained in this maxim. It is pos-
sible for weak persons to recognize their true good and yet not have
the strength to overcome their habitual pursuit of something at odds
with their true good.
Dante by contrast seems rather sanguine about the power of
knowledge:
Dunque a l’essenza ov’ è tanta avvantaggio,

che ciascun ben che fuor di lei si trova
altro non è ch’un lume di suo raggio,
più che in altra convien che si mova
la mente, amando, di ciascun che cerne
il vero in che si fonda questa prova.
(Par. 26.31–36)
Hence to that Essence where there is such eminence that any other
good is merely a share of its light, any mind must be moved by love—
any mind that grasps the truth on which this proof is founded.
The good that engages the will initially and necessarily is the vague
conception of what will wholly fulfill desire. On reflection, we might
say with Aristotle that our good will be the perfection (virtue) of
our distinctive activity, which is rational activity. But as pointed out
in chapter 2, rational activity is not a single thing—sometimes the
phrase means the activity of reason as such, theoretical or practical,
and sometimes it means activities other than reasoning which are
directed by reason. There is a plurality of virtues perfecting each of
these kinds of rational activity, a plurality of intellectual virtues and a
plurality of moral virtues. From a purely philosophical point of view,
one might say not only that the moral virtues have their specific ob-
jects, but that their acquisition removes obstacles to the perfection of
mind as such, and the ultimate perfection of mind is the contempla-
tion of eternal, divine things.
As we have discussed in earlier chapters, the ultimate end as un-
derstood by the Christian, and thus by Dante, is much, much more
than this. We are called to eternal union with God in love. This is
not something even dreamt of by philosophers. The philosophers of
course know of our warring appetites—how could they not? —but as
to why we are so divided against ourselves, they cannot say. The divi-
sion is there, it constitutes our moral task, and that is enough. But if
in reality human beings are called to an end that philosophers could
not know, it would seem that philosophers cannot provide us with
useful guidance for our lives.
Queen of Heaven 123
One must be careful here. St. Augustine once said that the vir-
tues of the philosophers are in reality vices. And certainly they would
be vices, if we thought that virtues as the philosophers talk of them,
virtues that we can with however strenuous an effort acquire, are the
means of achieving what we now know is our true end, our beatific
union with God. Nonetheless, the philosopher can achieve a true if
imperfect identification of our ultimate end. The morality that we
find in Plato and Aristotle may not be the whole story, but surely we
would not dismiss what they say of justice and courage and temper-
ance as wholly false. What Thomas Aquinas suggests is that we must
distinguish between an imperfect, inadequate understanding of our
end and a perfect understanding of it. The latter is what we accept
on the basis of faith. The natural and supernatural orders are thus
distinct but related; the one cannot do service for the other.
A question that theologians have asked over the years, among
them Thomas Aquinas, is whether we have a natural desire for the
supernatural end. If the beatific vision is indeed the end to which
men are called, their desire for it might be thought of either as a gift
along with the object desired—thus a supernatural desire for a super-
natural end—or as a natural desire. Why would anyone want to say
that we have a natural desire for our supernatural end? Well, for one
thing, the supernatural end is presented to us as the sum of all our
desires. As Thomas noted, this amounts to the identification of our
ultimate end with the beatific vision. But we desired our ultimate end
before we knew it consisted in the beatific vision. What we naturally
desire is whatever truly plays the role of our ultimate end. In that
sense, we can be said naturally to desire the supernatural end.
But a supernatural end is by definition beyond our natural reach.
Only with the aid of grace can we be turned toward our true end,
toward God, through the theological virtues of faith, hope, and
charity. St. Paul, referring to the altar of the Unknown God in Athens,
could say that he has come to tell the Athenians of that God. So too,
the preaching of the Good News is that this is our heart’s desire.
In Augustine’s words, once again, “You have made us for yourself,
O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” There is
a continuity between the natural and supernatural, but it is an odd
continuity, since one can achieve the supernatural only with the aid
of grace. This is why Thomas calls the natural desire for a supernatu-
ral end an “obediential potency.” We have the capacity for the super-
natural, but we do not have the wherewithal to achieve it. Only with
the help of grace can our natural desire for an all-fulfilling good be
raised to faith that this good is to be found in the beatific vision.
St. John, as we saw above, declared: “By means of the human in-
tellect and authority in concord with it, the highest of your loves to
God will go.” Is that all? Dante’s reply to this is moving.
Però ricominciai: “Tutti quei morsi

che posson far lo cor volgere a Dio,
a la mia caritate son concorsi:
ché l’essere del mondo e l’esser mio,
la morte ch’el sostenne perch’ io viva,
e quel che spera ogne fedel com’ io,
con la predetta conoscenza viva,
tratto m’hanno del mar de l’amor torto,
e del diritto m’han posto a la riva.
(Par. 26.55–63)
So I began again. “My charity comes from all those things that turn
the heart to God: the existence of the world and my own, the death
that He suffered that I might live; that which is the hope of all believers
and my own, along with the lived knowledge that I mentioned, have
drawn me from a distorted love and put me onto the right path.”
Di servo tratto a libertate: Brought from slavery to freedom
Beatrice, as we know, has been Dante’s guide since their reunion in

the Garden of Eden atop Mount Purgatory. Her scolding of him there
served as a reminder of what underlies Dante’s pilgrimage. He had
fallen into mortal sin, his salvation was jeopardized by his actions, he
found himself in a dark wood, lost, bewildered. We can all too eas-
ily get ourselves into such a predicament, but getting out is beyond
Queen of Heaven 125
our powers. The Mother of Mercy, painfully aware of Dante’s plight,

tells St. Lucy to speak to Beatrice about it. The importance of this
sequence cannot be overstated. One’s beloved may forget, a saint who
has been the object of one’s special devotion may need reminding,
but the Blessed Virgin Mary is, so to speak, the sleepless refuge of
sinners. She answers prayers even before they have been made. Dante
has reminded us that he began and ended each day with a prayer to
Mary. Mary is the prime mover of the Commedia. Yet we also must
not overlook the significance of all the intermediate causes in the
chain. Bestirred by St. Lucy, Beatrice goes to work to save the man
who loves her. She leaves her position in heaven, her location in the
celestial rose, and goes down into hell, where, in Limbo, she enlists
the aid of Virgil, who will lead Dante until he reaches the summit of
Mount Purgatory and Beatrice can take over.
By now, Beatrice has guided Dante up through the celestial
spheres, and in the heaven of the fixed stars he has witnessed the tri-
umph of Jesus and Mary as they ascend into the ultimate heaven, the
tenth, the celestial empyrean, where all reference to visible corporeal
things is absent. Before Dante can be taken higher, he is subjected
to examination on the theological virtues by saints Peter, James,
and John, respectively. Only then can Beatrice take him up into the
realm of the angels. Beyond is the celestial empyrean. Dante gazes
on the scene before him, the blessed forming a rose-like company.
At this point, Beatrice leaves him, returning to her appointed place
in the rose, and Dante’s last guide takes over. He is St. Bernard of
Clairvaux. His task is to obtain permission for Dante to glimpse,
while still in his mortal body, God Himself, to have a foretaste of the
beatific vision.
Consider the contrast with the beginning of the poem. Dante’s
plight was so bad that only the shock treatment of seeing the souls
in hell seemed likely to bring about a change of heart. The beginning
of wisdom is fear of the Lord. Masters of religious retreats once set
the scene by preaching on the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment,
Hell, and Heaven. St. Francis de Sales does much the same thing in
his Introduction to a Devout Life. James Joyce provides a powerful
sample of such sermons in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Anyone who finds such an approach a demeaning use of scare tactics,
a Jesuitical trick to get the simple faithful firmly under the clerical
thumb, will have trouble appreciating the opening cantica of the Com-
media. The description of the Inferno is Dante’s own, his imaginative
and poetic achievement, but hell for him is not a fiction. The little
seers of Fatima were given a glimpse of hell that lasted seconds and
yet stirred them to their depths. The great alternatives, heaven or hell,
underwrite the seriousness of the actions we perform. It matters how
we act. Every agent knows that. Every act is a conscious choice of a
course to which there is an alternative, and we are answerable for the
choices we make. We become our choices, so to speak. Our character
is built up of them, and every future choice reinforces or weakens that
character. Only if it did not, finally, really matter what we do could
the question of ultimate answerability be set aside. We should keep in
mind the allegorical meaning of the Commedia as Dante stated it in
his letter to Can Grande della Scala. The poem puts before us the way
in which human beings, by the use of their free will, determine their
just eternal condition.
Dante has come a long way since he found himself in that dark
wood. The lesson of hell and of eternal punishment had been taught
him as he descended deeper and deeper into the realm peopled by
those who failed to fulfill the very purpose of their lives, their reason
for being. It is the realm of despair. We detect a growing awareness
in Dante of what he has done, of the fate he has been risking. In the
second cantica he scales Mount Purgatory, as a penitent among peni-
tents. By the time of his reunion with Beatrice, all of the P’s represent-
ing the capital sins have been erased from his forehead, indicating
that recompense for them has been made. His sins have been for-
given, and he has been purged of their lingering taint. The waters of
Lethe will wash away the very memory of those sins, and the waters
of Eunoe will prepare him for what lies ahead.
When he ascends into the celestial empyrean, Dante attempts
to describe what he is seeing. Describing his own feelings is easier.
Imagine a barbarian’s reaction on first seeing imperial Rome, and we
will have some inkling of Dante’s response on seeing heaven.
ïo, che al divino da l’umano,

a l’etterno dal tempo era venuto,
Queen of Heaven 127
e di Fiorenza in popol giusto e sano,

di che stupor dovea esser compiuto!
(Par. 31.37–40)
What a stupor I was in when I came to the divine from the human,
to the eternal from time, to a people just and sane from Florence!
Consciousness of his own sinfulness never dims Dante’s condemna-

tion of political and ecclesiastical misbehavior. Thomas Aquinas, a
Dominican, can praise Francis of Assisi, and Bonaventure, a Francis-
can, can praise Dominic, but both lament the decadence in their own
religious orders, each not yet a century old. So too, St. Benedict will
recount with sadness the laxness that has crept into the monastic life.
The view from above provides a very somber picture of mankind. Bea-
trice, in turn, will decry the follies of men. Only by allowing oneself to
be led out of the dark wood will remedies for these moral evils come.
St. Bernard is Dante’s final guide. Why Bernard?15 Because of his
profound devotion to Mary.
E la regina del cielo, ond’ ïo ardo

tutto d’amor, ne farà ogne grazia,
però ch’i’ sono il suo fedel Bernardo.
(Par. 31.100–102)
The Queen of Heaven, for whom I wholly burn with love, will grant
us every grace, since I am her faithful Bernard.
Before Bernard takes over, however, but after Beatrice returns

to her place in the celestial rose, Dante makes a moving and impas-
sioned declaration of his debt to her. This can be read as the apotheo-
sis of what we already discerned in the Vita Nuova. The literal love of
a young man for a beautiful woman is allegorically transformed into
the story of his salvation.16
“O donna in cui la mia speranza vige,

e che soffristi per la mia salute
in inferno lasciar le tue vestige,
di tanti cose quant’ i’ ho vedute,

dal tuo podere e da la tua bontate
riconosco la grazia e la virtute.
Tu m’hai di servo tratto a libertate
per tutte quelle vie, per tutt’ i modi
che di ciò fare avei la potestate.
La tua magnificenza in me custodi,
sì che l’anima mia, che fatt’ hai sana,
piacente a te dal corpo si disnodi.”
(Par. 31.79–90)
O Lady, in whom my hope is strengthened and who for my

salvation’s sake went down to Hell and left your footprints there, in
all that I have seen I realize the grace and virtue of your power and
goodness. You have drawn me from slavery to freedom by all the
paths and ways that are in your power to do so. May your generosity
keep my soul healthy so that you will find it pleasing when, freed
from the body, it comes to you.
We were struck in reading the Vita Nuova by the way in which

Beatrice seems to be a figure for the Blessed Virgin, so much so that
she sometimes takes on traits and privileges of Mary. Now, in the
Paradiso, this no longer surprises. Mary is the pattern of all virtues,
as we have learned in the Purgatorio. She who is full of grace will
function as a model for those whose grace is less but, as we shall see,
has been dispensed through Mary’s hands. Now, in order for Dante
to be granted a glimpse of God, the intercession of Mary is required,
and Bernard has the credentials to address her. Mary is the queen to
whom this realm is subject and devoted (Par. 31.117). At Bernard’s
urging, Dante lifts his eyes to look at Mary. He can only describe her
for us by indirection. Mary is looking at the angels swirling and sing-
ing around her.
Vidi a lor giochi quivi e a lor canti

ridere una bellezza, che letizia
era ne li occhi a tutti li altri santi.
(Par. 31.133–135)
Queen of Heaven 129
I saw then a Loveliness smiling at their play and song so that there
was delight in the eyes of the other saints.
Mary is a mother smiling at her children at play. Her love is a

maternal tenderness rather than the aloofness that the title Queen
of Heaven might lead us to expect. Dante has seen Mary triumphant
earlier, when she ascended into the empyrean with Her Son, but with
this glimpse we enter the final phase of the sacred poem. From now
on it is overtly dominated by the Blessed Virgin. The canto ends with
Dante’s description of the love with which Bernard looks to Mary.
The Face Most Like the Face of Christ
In the final two cantos of the Paradiso, Dante attempts to describe a

world beyond the visible and to convey to us experiences so surpass-
ing earthly ones that his task seems impossible, as indeed he himself
says again and again. St. Paul has told us that eye has not seen nor ear
heard nor has it entered into the heart of man to know what God has
prepared for those who love Him. Yet Dante makes the attempt, and
he succeeds because of the centrality of Mary, Queen of Heaven and
Queen of the Angels. Her ultimate celestial role, taken by itself, may
seem to heighten the problem that Dante faces—until he writes one
of the most delightful tercets of the entire poem.
Riguarda omai ne la faccia che a Cristo

più si somiglia, ché la sua chiarezza
sola ti può disporre a veder Cristo.
(Par. 32.85–87)
Look now on that face that most resembles that of Christ; its
brightness alone can dispose you to see Christ.
This is a recurrent theme in Bernard’s sermons and other writ-

ings: Mary is the path by which we go to Christ, just as she was the
means of His coming among us as the Incarnate God. In order to
fulfill this providential role, Mary was accorded graces beyond
measure—gratia plena—more than any other mere human being,

and more than any angel. In this realm of unimaginable bliss, where
images and metaphors are of little help, we suddenly have the re-
minder that Mary, the Lady of Heaven on her throne of glory (Par.
32.29–30), is also the young woman who gave birth to Jesus in a
Bethlehem stable. His mother! Of course the son will resemble the
mother, and vice versa; what else does family resemblance mean?
The virgin whose Fiat complements the Fiat of creation accepts the
angel’s message and opens the way to salvation.
La piaga che Maria richiuse e unse,

quella ch’è tanto bella da’ suoi piedi
è colei che l’aperse e che la punse.
(Par. 32.4–6)
The wound that Mary healed and medicated, is that which Eve, now
sitting all lovely at her feet, pierced open.
The uniqueness of Mary’s role in the providential plan explains

her place in the celestial empyrean and the love and devotion shown
to her by the blessed. If Mary had not accepted the angel’s message,
none of them would be here.17 Their salvation literally hung on her
agreement, since without it there would have been no God Man
whose sacrifice and death opened the gates of heaven. Other advo-
cates we may have, other guides whose prompting and invocations
help us on our way. But none of them approaches the primacy of
Mary in this regard. In giving birth to the God Man, she becomes
an integral part of the redemptive plan. She is full of grace. That is
meant as a superlative; no other creature approaches her in holiness
or is more intimately bound up with the life of God. Mary is not only
the Mother of the Savior, she is the mother of those He saves. Her role
is not exhausted by the biological fact that she carried Jesus in her
womb for nine months. But even that period of waiting involved a
unique closeness of creature and God, an intimacy no other creature
could have: flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone. In the Incarnation
we see the fusing of the roles of natural mother and supernatural
mother of those Jesus came to save.
Queen of Heaven 131
Notice how Bernard moves easily from the reminder of the family
resemblance between Mary and her son to the mediating role she
plays. Look at her face, he urges Dante, the face so like the face of
Christ, for “its brightness alone can dispose you to see Christ.”18 Mary
is the way to Jesus, to the beatific vision. Dante has Bernard suggest
that there is no way anyone can bypass her and still come to God.
Earlier, an angel had been observed hovering over Mary. The
angel now begins to sing “Ave Maria, gratia plena,” Hail, Mary, full
of grace, and the whole heavenly court takes up the salutation. The
angel is Gabriel, the angel of the Annunciation. Bernard explains:
Ed elli a me: “Baldezza e leggiadria

quant’ esser puote in angelo e in alma,
tutta è in lui; e sì volem che sia,
perch’ elli è quelli che portò la palma
giuso a Maria, quando ’l Figliuol di Dio
carcar si volse de la nosta salma.”
(Par. 32.109–114)
He said to me, “Whatever of gallantry and elegance can exist in any

angel or soul is all in him, and rightly so in him who carried the palm
to Mary below, when the Son of God took on the burden of our flesh.”
As if to underscore the human, flesh-and-blood relationship of

mother and son, Bernard points out Anna, Mary’s mother, “so pleased
to see her daughter that, as Anna sings hosanna, she does not move
her eyes” (Par. 32.134–135). Anna is the grandmother of Jesus. Anna’s
presence brings home the marvel of the Incarnate God, who is like us
in everything save sin.
The survey of the blessed, arrayed rose-like before Dante and Ber-
nard, would not be complete without mention of St. Lucy, “she who
urged on your lady when you bent your brows downward, to your
ruin” (Par. 32.137–138). This is the final allusion to the long pilgrimage
Dante has taken and how and under what auspices it began. His des-
tination has been reached. He has arrived in the empyrean, the tenth
heaven, the destined home of the blessed. And they are blessed be-
cause they see God. In that vision human happiness is complete. Only
one thing remains, and that is for Dante to be given an experience not
accorded to mortal men. Only by the intercession of Mary will this
special grace be granted him—a taste of that beatifying vision. Earlier,
Bernard had assured Dante that she “will grant us every grace” (Par.
31.101). Now, Bernard urges Dante to pray for the grace to penetrate
the divine radiance “from that one who has the power to help you”
(Par. 32.148). He is to do this by following along as Bernard prays. And
thus the transition is made to the final canto.
Figlia del tuo figlio
The final canto of the Paradiso, as well as the final canto of the Com-
media, begins with Bernard’s magnificent prayer to the Blessed Vir-
gin, in which he beseeches her to obtain for Dante the grace of a vision
of God. That vision will be the culmination of Dante’s pilgrimage. It is
the completion of the long journey from his initial state of sinfulness,
through the underworld of Hell, where the seriousness of human life
and the imperative to live it well are brought home to him by seeing
those whose sins have cut them off forever from their very reason
for being—union with God. Like Dante, they preferred lesser goods
to the greatest good, but unlike Dante and ourselves, all opportunity
of conversion and change is gone for them. On then to Purgatory,
where Dante joins the souls who are destined for beatitude but must
first undergo a period of penance to purge their souls of the effects of
their forgiven sins. Having reached the summit of Mount Purgatory,
he is reunited with Beatrice at last, and she takes over from Virgil to
lead him on to the next realm, the heavenly paradise which makes up
immeasurably for that earthly one and where he will see what God
has in store for those who love Him. Up through the gradations of
blessedness, represented by the Ptolemaic planets, they emerge into
the highest heaven, the celestial empyrean, where all the blessed actu-
ally dwell. The vast throng is presented to him in the form of a rose
in which the blessed are arranged hierarchically. And he lifts his eyes
to see Mary, the Queen of Heaven. Suddenly, Beatrice is no longer his
guide; he finds himself with Bernard of Clairvaux, whose devotion to
Mary was legendary. The only way Dante will be able to see, however
Queen of Heaven 133
briefly, God himself in the trinity of Persons is if Mary obtains for

him the grace to do so. It is Bernard’s task to beg her to bestow that
grace. And so he begins his prayer.
“Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio,

umile e alta più che creatura,
termine fisso d’etterno consiglio,
tu se’ colei che l’umana natura
nobilitasti sì, che ’l suo fattore
non disdegnò di farsi sua fattura.
Nel ventre tuo si raccese l’amore,
per lo cui caldo ne l’etterna pace
così è germinato questo fiore.
Qui se’ a noi meridïana face
di caritate, e giuso, intra ’ mortali,
se’ di speranza fontana vivace.
Donna, se’ tanto grande e tanto vali,
che qual vuol grazia e a te non ricorre,
sua disïanza vuol volar sanz’ ali.
La tua benignità non pur soccorre
a chi domanda, ma molte fiate
liberamente al dimandar precorre.
In te misericordia, in te pietate,
in te magnificenza, in te s’aduna
quantunque in creatura è di bontate.”
(Par. 33.1–21)
In Mandelbaum’s translation of this canto,19
“Virgin mother, daughter of your Son,

more humble and sublime than any creature,
fixed good decreed from all eternity,
you are the one who gave to human nature
so much nobility that its Creator
did not disdain His being made its creature.
That love whose warmth allowed this flower to bloom
within the everlasting peace—was love
rekindled in your womb; for us above,

you are the noonday torch of charity,
and there below, on earth, among the mortals,
you are a living spring of hope. Lady,
you are so high, you can so intercede,
that he who would have grace but does not seek
your aid, may long to fly but has no wings.
Your loving-kindness does not only answer
the one who asks, but it is often ready
to answer freely long before the asking.
In you compassion is, in you is pity,
in you is generosity, in you
is every goodness found in any creature.”
This first part of Bernard’s prayer consists of praise of Mary and

is a veritable florilegium of her titles and privileges. At once virgin
and mother, the virginity of Mary before and after the birth of Christ
is a firm part of traditional belief. Her son being divine, Mary para-
doxically becomes the daughter of her son, but of course her daugh-
tership and his sonship are quite different relations of dependence.
That a mere creature could give birth to God, to be quite truly des-
ignated as the Mother of God, is a paradox captured often in the
liturgy: “Genuisti qui te fecit” (You have given birth to the one who
created you); “Quem caeli capere non poterant, tuo gremio contu-
listi” (He whom the heavens cannot contain was contained in your
womb). It is this that places a humble young woman at the very apex
of creation, as part of a plan from all eternity. By her conduct she has
so ennobled the race that the creator did not disdain becoming her
son. It was Mary’s love, Bernard continues, that “allowed this flower
to bloom,” that is, the whole company of the blessed. No wonder
their voices rise in praise and gratitude to Mary. “Ave Maria, gratia
plena.” She is the living torch of charity “above” and a living spring
of hope for those “below.” Once more, Dante reminds us that of the
theological virtues, only charity remains in heaven; hope and faith
mark the condition of the church militant. All this is by way of prep-
aration for an extraordinary acknowledgment in Bernard’s prayer of
Mary’s continuing providential role. Grace comes to us only through
Queen of Heaven 135
the hands of Mary: she is the mediatrix of grace. Any attempt to

bypass her is like a wingless bird attempting flight. This is not a role
conferred on Mary by the blessed or by those who intercede with
her. God chose to come to us through Mary, and we are to go to him
through Mary. As has been mentioned long before, in the Purga-
torio, Mary is ready to give grace even before it is asked. She is the
compassionate one, the one who has pity on us and is correspond-
ingly generous. In Mary is “every goodness found in any creature.”
That is, Mary is the most perfect of God’s creatures, thanks to the
grace she has received that exceeds that of any other creature. She
is placed above the choirs of angels, although from a natural point
of view, the lowest angel is higher than the most talented human.
But we are in the supernatural order—the divine plan formulated to
redeem sinful mankind and calling us to a happiness far exceeding
what Adam lost by his sin. We have seen the comparison of Eve and
Mary: Eve is the mother of sinful mankind; Mary the mother of God
and of all those God has chosen to save.
No one can fail to sense the devotion throbbing in these verses.
Their spokesman is at once a historical figure—the saintly abbot of
Clairvaux, advisor of popes, preacher of Crusades, foe of Abelard—
and the author of sermons and commentaries exhibiting his profound
devotion to Mary. It is these works that Dante knew and on which
he bases the lines he attributes to Bernard in the Paradiso. Every ut-
terance in this prayer can be matched with passages from Bernard
himself. When we consider all of the great saints and theologians
who have appeared during the upward flight of Dante and Beatrice,
we find some, St. Bonaventure, certainly, whose fervor in writing of
Mary matches that of Bernard. Nevertheless, Dante’s selection of Ber-
nard for this key role in the final canto both has historical grounding
and doubtless reflects a personal preference as well. Bernard’s prayer
continues,
“Or questi, che da l’infima lacuna

de l’universo infin qui ha vedute
le vite spiritali ad una ad una,
supplica a te, per grazia, di virtute
tanto, che possa con li occhi levarsi
più alto verso l’ultima salute.

E io, che mai per mio veder non arsi
più ch’i’ fo per lo suo, tutti miei prieghi
ti porgo, e priego che non sieno scarsi,
perché tu ogne nube li disleghi
di sua mortalità co’ prieghi tuoi,
sì che ’l sommo piacer li si dispieghi.”
(Par. 33.22–33)
“This man—who from the deepest hollow in

the universe, up to this height, has seen
the lives of spirits, one by one—now pleads
with you, through grace, to grant him so much virtue
that he may lift his vision higher still—
may lift it toward the ultimate salvation.
And I, who never burned for my own vision
more than I burn for his, do offer you
all of my prayers—and pray that they may not
fall short—that, with your prayers, you may disperse
all of the clouds of his mortality
so that the Highest Joy be his to see.”
In this part of his prayer, Bernard makes his petition: let this
mortal who has been led up from the depths of hell be permitted,
mortal though he is, to see the One who is the alpha and omega of
all things, the telos of creation, our reason for being, possession of
whom, if granted by his grace, will more than fulfill every desire
of the human heart. We notice Bernard’s statement that he is as eager
for Dante’s vision as he ever was for his own. Doubtless this is the
symmetrical counterpart of Dante’s devotion to Bernard. Even so, it
seems an extraordinary remark.20 But Dante is surely not about to
falter at this point in his continuing assumption that his own story,
his own fate, and his own salvation possess cosmic importance. Now
here he is, a mortal among the immortals, a welcome guest, waiting
while one of the great mystics implores Mary to grant Dante a taste
of the beatific vision. Is this hubris? Once more we have to consider
the genesis of his pilgrimage: Mary summoned him and led him by
Queen of Heaven 137
means of intermediary guides to this point, where her faithful Ber-

nard can ask Mary in effect to complete the pilgrimage she has insti-
gated. We can never forget that the Commedia is the story of Dante’s
salvation, and that he is now spiritually prepared for what is about to
happen, thanks to the pleas of Bernard and the compassion of Mary.
“Ancor ti priego, regina, che puoi

ciò che tu vuoli, che conservi sani,
dopo tanto veder, li affetti suoi.
Vinca tua guardia i movimenti umani:
vedi Beatrice con quanti beati
per li miei prieghi ti chiudon le mani!”
(Par. 33.34–39)
“This too, o Queen, who can do what you would,

I ask of you: that after such a vision,
his sentiments preserve their perseverance.
May your protection curb his mortal passions.
See Beatrice—how many saints with her!
They join my prayers! They clasp their hands to you!”
The prayer ends here, with Bernard’s hope that Dante, having
been accorded a foretaste of eternity, will not lapse into the faults of
old on returning to his still unfinished mortal life. This brings home
yet again the central reminder of the poem. As long as we are alive we
can repent and change our lives, or we can succumb to the passions
and to sin. Call no man happy while he is yet alive, the ancients said
(although they were thinking rather of one’s posthumous reputation).
Dante’s point is that we can call no man definitively happy, or the re-
verse, until he is dead.
Lasciare alla futura gente: Leave for a future people
When Mary indicates her assent to Bernard’s request, it is with a smile,

with the expression of her eyes. Dante would never put words of his
in her mouth. Things happen rapidly now. The poet has difficulty
describing what he was permitted to see. Bernard signals what Dante

is to do, but there is no need of that. Dante has already lifted his puri-
fied sight to the ray of Light. Light is the element of the empyrean, a
supernatural, spiritual light, and the light at which Dante now gazes
is God. Of course, words fail him. The narrative now becomes a recol-
lection of the experience, rather than a present report of it.
O somma luce che tanto ti levi

da’ concetti mortali, al a mia mente
ripresta un poco di quel che parevi,
e fa la lingua mia tanto possente,
ch’una favilla sol de la tua gloria
possa lasciare a la futura gente;
ché, per tornare alquanto a mia memoria
e per sonare un poco in questi versi,
più si conceperà di tua vittoria.
(Par. 33.67–75)
O Highest Light, You, raised so far above

the minds of mortals, to my memory
give back something of Your epiphany,
and make my tongue so powerful that I
may leave to people of the future one
gleam of the glory that is Yours, for by
returning somewhat to my memory
and echoing awhile within these lines,
Your victory will be more understood.
Continuing to look into the ray of light, he felt that he would have
gone astray if he dared turn his eyes away. His vision reaches the In-
finite Goodness.
Oh abbondante grazia ond’ io presunsi

ficcar lo viso per la luce etterna,
tanto che la veduta vi consunsi!
(Par. 33.82–84)
Queen of Heaven 139
O grace abounding, through which I presumed

to set my eyes on the Eternal Light
so long that I spent all my sight on it!
And what does he see? In the depths of that Light, that Infinite
Goodness, he sees everything that is scattered and separate in the
universe—substance and accidents, dispositions—all as if united.
He has gone beyond beings to the Being that contains the sum of all
perfections, perfections merely participated in by creatures. However
unsatisfying his description of it, Dante feels a keen joy in making
the effort. The moment of his vision outweighs twenty-five centuries.
Caught up in a mystic rapture, his mind was “intent, steadfast, and
motionless—gazing; and it grew ever more enkindled as it watched”
(Par. 33.98–99).
A quella luce cotal si diventa,

che volgersi da lei per altro aspetto
è impossibil che mai si consenta;
però che ’l ben, ch’è del volere obietto,
tutto s’accoglie in lei, e fuor di quella
è defettivo ciò ch’è lì perfetto.
(Par. 33.100–105)
Whoever sees that Light is soon made such

that it would be impossible for him
to set that Light aside for other sight;
because the good, the object of the will,
is fully gathered in that Light; outside
that Light, what there is perfect is defective.
The Light is Goodness itself, and all created goods, however per-
fect of their kind, are by comparison imperfect. All the longing of the
human heart is satisfied here; Goodness contains all and more than
one had sought in lesser goods.
Dante continues to gaze on the Light that is God, and as he does
his vision goes deeper still. The Trinity of Persons in the godhead
becomes, as it were, visible as interpenetrating circles of light within

the Light, of different colors as they move.
Ne la profonda e chiara sussistenza

de l’alto lume parvermi tre giri
di tre colori e d’una contenenza;
e l’un da l’altro come iri da iri
parea reflesso, e ’l terzo parea foco
che quinci e quindi igualmente si spiri.
(Par. 33.115–120)
In the deep and bright

essence of that exalted Light, three circles
appeared to me; they had three different colors,
but all of them were of the same dimension;
one circle seemed reflected by the second,
as rainbow is by rainbow, and the third
seemed fire breathed equally by those two circles.
Because we are listening to a remembered experience, a first-

person narrative, we tend to forget that Dante Alighieri is attempt-
ing in human language to give expression to the ultimate mystery,
the Trinity of Persons in the One God. Once more, he disarms us
by exclaiming that his words are inadequate to the experience, but
of course the experience is as artful as the words that express it. He
is describing an imagined mystic experience. Poetic daring could
scarcely go beyond this. Then Dante retreats to the comparative
safety of theological expressions.
O luce etterna che sola in te sidi,

sola t’intendi, e da te intelletta
e intendente te ami e arridi!
(Par. 33.124–126)
Eternal Light, You only dwell within

Yourself, and only You know You; Self-knowing,
Self known, You love and smile upon Yourself!
Queen of Heaven 141
Dante is describing Aristotle’s concept of Thought Thinking Itself.

Perhaps we sense relief in this appeal to another effort, a speculative
effort, to express in human terms the nature of God. Does Dante also
glimpse how we are made in the image of God? He wishes to know
this, compares such an effort to squaring the circle, yet adds,
se non che la mia mente fu percossa

da un fulgore in che sua voglia venne.
(Par. 33.140–141)
But then my mind was struck by light that flashed

and, with this light, received what it had asked.
Dante’s vision is now over, but his desire and will are moved, like a
rotating wheel, by “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle”—“the Love
that moves the sun and the other stars” (Par. 33.145).
Epilogue
The great French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal had

a mystical experience, a kind of private revelation, that changed his
life. He wrote down a description in French and Latin and wore a
copy next to his heart for the rest of his life. It is known as Pascal’s
Memorial:1
Fire.
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,
not of the philosophers and the learned.
Certainty, certainty, feeling, joy, peace.
God of Jesus Christ,
My God and your God.
Your God will be my God.
The world and everything but God forgotten.
He can be found only by the paths taught in the Gospel.
The grandeur of the human soul.
The Just Father whom the world has not known, but I have known Him.
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
I have separated myself from him:
They have forsaken me, the fount of living water.
My God, do not abandon me
Lest I be eternally separated from you.
143
This is eternal life, that they should know the one true God and the one
whom He has sent, Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
I have abandoned him, fled him, renounced and crucified him.
May I never be separated from him.
He can be had only by the paths taught in the Gospel.
Total and sweet renunciation. Etc.
Total submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.
Eternally in joy for a day of testing on earth.
May I not forget your words. Amen.
We notice the reference in the first line to fire to express the vi-
sion, perhaps similar to Dante’s reliance on light in canto 33 of the
Paradiso. The message in these disconnected and fragmentary lines
may let us down, but we must remember that the Memorial was a
private note, addressed to himself. Pascal never intended it to be pub-
lished. Pascal was attempting to record what cannot engage the mind
or heart of just any passerby, any scholarly voyeur. Kierkegaard once
quoted a remark of Lichtenberg on Scripture: “Such works are like
mirrors. If a monkey looks in, no apostle looks out.” Dante makes
similar demands.
Unlike Pascal in the Memorial, Dante was not writing for himself
alone. And we know who his intended readers were: all those who
by their free acts are justly earning an eternal reward or punishment.
Few readers can fail to respond to the exquisite art with which he has
put before us his imaginary pilgrimage—imaginary only in a sense.
Human life and its destiny provide the spine of this story, and Dante
was not making that up. Keen as our aesthetic enjoyment of the Com-
media may be, intriguing as are the intellectual elements of the narra-
tive, we know that Dante was after a deeper response than those. He
wanted to move us from the misery of sin to eternal happiness. And
he shows us the inescapable centrality of the Blessed Virgin Mary in
that conversion.
notes
Prologue
1. Hellmut Schnackenburg, Maria in Dantes Göttlicher Komödie (Freiburg

in Breisgau: Herder, 1956); Jaroslav Pelikan, Eternal Feminines: Three Theological
Allegories in Dante’s Paradiso (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
1990); Domenico Bassi, Il Mese di Maggio con Dante (Rome: Opera Nazionale
per il Mezzogiorno d’Italia, 1921); Renato Nicodemo, La Vergine Maria nella
Divina Commedia (Florence: Firenze Atheneum, 2001). To these I add the pe-
rennial work of Frédéric Ozanam, Dante and Catholic Philosophy in the Thir-
teenth Century, trans. Lucia D. Pychowska (New York: The Cathedral Library
Association, 1913).
2. See Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort, A Treatise on the True Devo-
tion to the Blessed Virgin Mary (Bay Shore, N.Y.: Montfort Fathers, 1941).
3. See, for example, De Koninck’s “Pour nos frères dans le Christ,” in
Tout homme est mon prochain (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1964),
pp. 17ff. An English translation of this work will appear in a forthcoming vol-
ume of The Writings of Charles De Koninck (University of Notre Dame Press).
4. Charles DeKoninck, Ego Sapientia: La sagesse qui est Marie (Quebec:
Fides, 1943). An English translation appears in volume 2 of The Writings of
Charles De Koninck, ed. and trans. Ralph McInerny (Notre Dame, Ind.: Univer-
sity of Notre Dame Press, 2009).
5. In the essay by Jorge Louis Borges, “The Divine Comedy,” included
in The Poets’ Dante, ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 118.
6. Paul Claudel, “Introduction à un poème sur Dante,” in Oeuvres en
prose, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), pp. 422ff.
145
146 Notes to Pages 1–11
ONE . A New Life Begins
1. That Beatrice does not share this view is clear from Purgatorio 30 and
31, where she chides Dante for his fickleness.
2. Calling the great poem the Divine Comedy is established usage,
even though Dante himself never referred to it in that way, but simply as the
Commedia.
3. Super Missus Est, Homilia IV, 1; Sancti Bernardi Opera Omnia, ed. Ma-
billon (Paris, 1839), vol. 1, Tomus tertius, 1694.
4. VN 2. In Dante Alighieri, Vita Nova, a cura Luca Carlo Rossi, Intro-
duzione Guglielmo Gorni (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1999). Hereafter, Rossi,
Vita Nova.
5. Dante also introduced her as la gloriosa donna (“in glory,” that is, in
Paradise).
6. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in The Portable Dante, ed. Paolo Milano (New
York: Viking Penguin, 1969), pp. 550–51.
7. See for example, Rossi’s commentary in Vita Nova, p. 13, on this pas-
sage. We are asked to think of Luke 3:16, and the words of John the Baptist: “I
indeed baptize you with water, but there comes one stronger than I.”
8. Beatrice died in 1290; Dante married Gemma in 1285.
9. See Charles Singleton, An Essay on the Vita Nuova (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1949), pp. 63–74.
10. Who has ever been truly surprised by Chaucer’s Retractions, in which
the maker of this book—The Canterbury Tales—takes his leave: “Wherefore I
beseech you meekly for the mercy of God to pray for me, that Christ have
mercy on me and forgive me my sins: and especially for my translations and
inditings of worldly vanities, which I revoke in my retractions: as are the book
of Troilus; also the book of Fame; the book of The Nineteen Ladies; the book
of The Duchess; the book of St Valentine’s Day of the Parliament of Fowls; The
Tales of Canterbury, those that tend towards sin; the book of The Lion; and
many another book, if they were in my memory; and many a song and many
a lecherous lay; that Christ in his great mercy forgive me the sin.” Chaucer,
The Canterbury Tales, a new translation by Nevill Coghill (Baltimore: Penguin
Classics, 1952), p. 513.
11. In his remarks prior to VN 19, Rossi, Vita Nova, p. 150, notes that only
two persons have been raised body and soul into heaven, Christ and Mary. This
is insisted on in the Paradiso, when St. John dismisses the legend that he too is
in heaven body and soul.
12. Gorni, in his introduction to Rossi, Vita Nova, p. xvi.
13. Ibid., p. xviii.
14. Dante tells us that this training cost him thirty months attendance
in the schools of the religious and at philosophical disputations. In so short a
time he came to savor the sweetness of wisdom which drove out all else (Con-
vivio 2.12).
Notes to Pages 14–20 147
t wo. In the Midst of My Days
1. The Divine Comedy, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers, vol. 1, Hell (Hammer-

smith: Penguin Books, 1949), p. 71.
2. Guglielmo Gorni, one of the most helpful of Dante scholars, has dedi-
cated an entire book to this opening canto of the Comedy. See Gorni, Dante
nella Selva, Il Primo canto della Commedia (Parma: Pratiche Editrice, 1995).
3. Maurice Baring, in Have You Anything To Declare? (New York: Al-
fred A. Knopf, 1937), pp. 127–29, noting that it was under the influence of the
German higher criticism of the Bible that Ernest Renan lost his faith, adds in-
triguingly that many, in following the course of Renan’s argument, have been
led into the faith the great apostate lost. Baring also suggests that if only Renan
had lived to see what such criticism did to Shakespeare, he might himself have
retraced his steps.
4. C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1961).
5. According to Robert Hollander on the letter and the controversies it
has generated, this approach is reasonably well-grounded. See Robert Hollander,
Dante’s Epistle to Cangrande (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).
6. Convivio 1.1. See also Jean Pépin, Dante et la tradition de l’allégorie
(Montreal: Vrin, 1970).
7. Cicero, in his De senectute (On Old Age), a favorite of Dante’s, dis-
cusses the aetas media in section 76. A current Italian translation of Cicero, fac-
ing the Latin text, renders this unbashedly as “si trova ‘nel mezzo del cammin di
nostra vita,’ ” that is, “finds himself ‘Midway this way of life we’re bound upon.’ ”
Cicerone, De senectute, De amicitia, a cura Guerino Pacitti, Classici Greci e
Latini 109 (Milan: Oscar Mondadori, 1965), p. 73.
8. Thomas’s commentary on 2 Corinthians can be found in Super Episto-
las S. Pauli Lectura, ed. Raphaelis Cai, O.P., editio 8 revisa, vol. 1 (Turin: Mari-
etti, 1953).
9. The jingle runs,
George Brush is my name;
America’s my nation;
Ludington’s my dwelling-place
And heaven’s my destination.
The proper name and home town, of course, varied with the pupil. See Thorn-
ton Wilder, Heaven’s My Destination (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935).
10. In a much later book, The Eighth Day, addressing a more jaded reader,
Wilder ends his fascinating story thus: “History is one tapestry. No eye can ven-
ture to compass more than a hand’s breadth. . . . There is much talk of a design
in the arras. Some are certain they see it. Some see what they have been told to
see. Some remember that they saw it once but have lost it, Some are strength-
ened by seeing a pattern wherein the oppressed and exploited of the earth are
gradually emerging from their bondage. Some find strength in the conviction
that there is nothing to see. Some” Here the sentence and the book ends. One is
tempted to complete it thus: Some, like Dante, with a vision infused with faith,
give us the truth of the matter.
11. Thus begins the fifth of the “Divine Poems.” John Donne, Poetical
Works, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 295.
12. This veltro, or greyhound, who will come and solve the political prob-
lems of the age can serve as an indicator of the risks of scholarship. Since Virgil
is making a prediction, it would seem fairly easy to identify this savior ex post
facto. But perhaps more ink has been spilled on this single reference than on
any other.
13. I am summarizing the opening five questions of Summa theologiae
IaIIae (First Part of the Second Part), and Nicomachean Ethics 1.13 and St.
Thomas’s commentary thereon.
14. This seems strong, if Virgil was simply born at a time and place where
the Good News could not have come to him. Elsewhere, Virgil stresses that he
is in Limbo through no fault of his own.
THREE . The Seven Storey Mountain
1. The second part of the angelic salutation, “Holy Mary,” and so forth,
was added in 431 by Pope St. Celestine I in response to the heresy of Nestorius.
Paul Claudel, Journal, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 497.
2. Virtues and vices are habits, settled dispositions to act well or badly,
but habits are built of singular acts, good or bad, and lead us on to others of the
same kind. Whenever the “age of reason” begins—and who does not remember
his first awareness of doing wrong?—from its dawn, we are forming by means
of the ways we act what we morally are, that is, our character.
3. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy 3.1.
4. Wallace Stevens, in section 11 of “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle.”
5. Thomas, in Super Evangelium S. Matthei Lectura, ed. Raphaelis Cai,
O.P., editio 5 revisa (Turin: Marietti, 1951), n. 400.
6. Ibid., n. 403.
7. Ibid., n. 404.
8. Although the treatment in the Summa theologiae is later than that of
the Disputed Questions on Evil (De malo), I am guided chiefly by the latter. The
plan of the Summa dictated that discussions of the capital sins are scattered; in
the De malo we find a treatment of the capital sins as such, beginning with q. 8.
9. In an old academic joke, a professor dies and appears before St. Peter,
who checks the records, shakes his head, and tells the professor he must go to
hell. Immediately the professor finds himself in a well-appointed apartment;
there are his favorite books, wines, pictures, and music. Gourmet dining is
always available. There is an endless supply of El Diablo cigars. The profes-
sor is puzzled. He calls St. Peter. “Has a mistake been made?” “How so?” The
professor describes his sybaritic setting. “That’s right, professor.” “But how can
this be hell?” A pause, and then St. Peter murmurs, “You must share the apart-
ment with a colleague.”
10. The full opening passage of lectio 15 of the Speculum is: “Blessed are
thou amongst women. Of the blessedness of our blessed Virgin let us say more, let
us hear more. Happy is the blessed Mary, unhappy every damned soul, all those
to whom is said, Depart from me, ye cursed, into eternal fire. Damned certainly
is every vicious soul, and the virtuous Mary is blessed. Damnation comes into
the world through the seven capital sins, Mary obtained blessedness through the
contrary virtues. O Mary, blessed art thou amongst women. Blessed in humility
as opposed to pride, in charity as opposed to envy, in meekness opposed to wrath,
in steadiness opposed to sloth, liberality opposed to avarice, sobriety rather than
gluttony, and chastity rather than lust” (277b–278a, Opera of Bonaventure).
11. This marvelous work has now been ascribed to Conrad of Saxony. See
Chiavacci Leonardi in her introduction to her edition of the Purgatorio, pp.
xxii–xxiii.
12. Speculum 278a.
13. There is also a tradition holding that Mary had vowed herself to vir-
ginity before the Annunciation. If so, this raises questions about the meaning
of her betrothal to Joseph. But by tradition, after the Annunciation, Joseph too
having been visited by an angel, both spouses were vowed to virginity.
14. Domenico Bassi, Il Mese di Maggio con Dante, p. 19.
15. See Chiavacci Leonardi in her edition of the Purgatorio, introduction
to canto 10, p. 291.
16. This priority of Christ is never to be forgotten, yet Dante puts Mary
forward first when he gives examples of the virtues opposed to the capital sins.
We will discuss this later. A sign of our blindness is the temptation to think of
Mary as in some way the rival of Her Son. However, if Christ is our primary
mediator with the Father, there are secondary mediators as well, and of these
Mary is far and away the first. This is not some antic choice of Dante and the
Church fathers and doctors on whom he relies, but an ineradicable feature of
the providential plan of salvation.
17. See R. P. Cornelii a Lapide, Commentaria in Quatuor Evangelia, ed.
Antonius Padovani (Turin: Marietti, 1922), Tomus III, p. 201.
18. ST IIaIIae, q. 157.
19. Cornelii a Lapide, Commentaria in Quatuor Evangelia, Tomus III,
p. 125b.
20. In the Latin of the original,
3. Quoniam ipse liberavit me de laqueo venantium, et a verbo

aspero.
4. Scapulis suis obumbrabit tibi: et sub pennis ejus sperabis.
5. Scuto circumdabit te veritas ejus: non timebis a timore nocturno,
6. A sagitta volante in die, a negotio perambulante in tenebris: ab
incurso, et daemonio meridiano.
21. See Chiavacci Leonardi in her edition of the Purgatorio, p. 661, note on
line 142.
22. According to Thomas, “Of all the passions the most difficult to regu-
late by reason is that of pleasure, and especially those natural pleasures constant
in our lives such as the pleasures associated with food and drink without which
human life is impossible, and many desert the rule of reason in their regard.
When desire for such pleasure transcends the rule of reason there is the sin of
gluttony, since gluttony is immoderate desire in eating” (De malo, q. 15, a. 1, c).
One may be reminded of Dr. Johnson’s remark that, with respect to alcohol, he
found abstinence easier than moderation.
23. See Charles Singleton on this canto, in The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio,
text and commentary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 121 of
commentary.
24. Thomas puts the burden of this teleology on the father; the father
has the primary task of educating the child and preparing it for life, and the
mother’s nurturing belongs to the early years. Thomas notes that he will not
take up here the question of monogamy or the length of a marriage, for a life-
time or not. He does discuss these topics elsewhere and argues that polyandry is
clearly wrong: a woman who sleeps with many men will have difficulty knowing
which is the father of her child. The case for monogamy is less obvious, and is
grounded in the friendship that cohabitation should bring about. That would
provide a reason against abandoning a wife once her fruitful years are over
and turning to someone younger (or, one may add, abandoning a husband for
similar incapacities). But the indissolubility of marriage has its true grounding
in Scripture: whom God has joined together, let no man put asunder. On these
matters, see Summa theologiae, Supplementum, q. 65. Questions 41 through 68,
all of them taken from Thomas’s earlier commentary on the Sentences of Peter
Lombard, constitute an extensive treatment of matrimony. Question 15 of De
malo presupposes this discussion and deals only with the vice of lust.
25. See Teodolinda Barolini, Dante’s Poets, Textuality and Truth in the
Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
26. George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, Goethe,
Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1927). See also T. S. Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, ed. and
introduced by Ronald Schuchard (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1993). See
too my Aquinas Lecture, given at Marquette University: Rhyme and Reason: Saint
Thomas and Modes of Discourse (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1981).
27. See Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analyt-
ics, trans. and commentary by Richard Berquist (South Bend, Ind.: Dumb Ox
Books, 2007).
28. Singleton is doubtless right that this new telos did not entail getting
rid of Beatrice, however ambiguous the Convivio is when it compares itself to
the Vita Nuova. In Convivio 1.1, comparing his present task with the earlier
work, Dante says that now he will treat more virilmente what he had treated
earlier; the Vita Nuova is fervent and passionate, the Convivio temperate and
virile. He attributes this to his youth in writing the earlier work, and his matu-
rity now. The contrast has puzzled many, among them myself. In the first chap-
ter I advanced a fancied hypothesis for the fact that the Convivio, whose well
thought-out plan is given to us early, was left unfinished. Like the Vita Nuova, it
consists of both poetry and prose, the prose sections being heavy treatises that
expound the literal and allegorical meaning of the odes preceding them. The
reader is certainly aware that Dante has been to school in the meantime. There
is no expression in the Convivio, as in the final paragraph of the Vita Nuova, of
dissatisfaction with what he has done. But dropping the work is perhaps elo-
quent. He would go on to the Comedy, from which prose is absent.
29. Thus, in his work Orthodoxy, Chesterton considers original sin a fact,
not a dogma.
30. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Italian and English, trans. with
introd. and commentary by Allen Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1982), vol. 3, Paradiso, pp. 60, 62.
31. Ibid., vol. 2, Purgatorio, p. 270.
FOU R . Queen of Heaven
1. Chiavacci Leonardi comments: “The simple confession that Dante

makes at this point—unique in the poem and in all his work—of his daily prayer
is another singular mark of this scene in the Paradiso, where the dearest human
feelings invade the heaven of inaccessible divine eternity with a profound and
almost unavoidable mistake” (the mistake of importing time into eternity). In
her edition of the Paradiso, p. 641, note to lines 88–90 (my translation).
2. An indulgence for saying the Angelus morning and night was granted
by Pope John XXII in 1318, which suggests that the practice was already com-
mon. Saying the Angelus at noon came later.
3. During the Pascal season, this antiphon is substituted for the Angelus
as the final prayer after Compline.
4. Heb. 11:1. For Dante and St. Thomas, the Vulgate text read: “fides est
substantia rerum sperandarum, argumentum non apparentium.”
5. Thomas’s commentary on Hebrews can be found in Super Epistolas
S. Pauli Lectura, ed. Raphaelis Cai, O.P., vol. 2 (Turin: Marietti, 1953).
6. Such remarks, frequent enough in Thomas, make efforts to drive a
wedge between him and Dante on the matter unconvincing.
7. Super Epistolas S. Pauli Lectura, vol. 2, n. 557.
8. Thomas’s De magistro (On the Teacher), prompted by Augustine’s work
by the same name, can be found in his Disputed Questions on Truth (De ver.), q. 11.
9. See De ver., q. 14, a. 1.
10. See De ver., q. 14, a. 9, on the relation of known truths to believed
truths. According to Thomas, “it should be said that the way God is demon-
strated to be one is not called an article of faith, but is presupposed by the ar-
ticles, for the knowledge of faith presupposes natural knowledge just as grace
presupposes nature. But the unity of the divine essence, as this is held by the
faithful, like providence and universal providence, and the like, which cannot
be proved, constitute articles” (q. 14, a. 9, ad 8). More will be said of this later.
11. See Charles De Koninck, La Piété du Fils: Etudes sur l’Assomption
(Quebec: Les Presses Universitaires Laval, 1954).
12. I Summa contra gentes, 3: “Among the things that we confess about
God there are truths of two kinds” (emphasis added).
13. The assumption is that one cannot know and believe the same truth
at the same time and in the same respect. Knowledge follows on proof (or self-
evidence), whereas belief reposes on someone’s say-so, on authority. The be-
liever who proves the existence of God no longer believes that God exists in
the manner that he has proved it. These are, of course, narrow senses of “know”
and “believe.” Often we speak of what we believe as what we know and of what
we know as our beliefs. But these broad senses of the terms do not deny the
contrast resulting from their narrower senses.
14. See I Summa contra gentes, 4: “If the only path to knowledge of God
lay through reason, the human race would be left in the deepest shadows of
ignorance.” Why? Because only a few can formulate cogent proofs of the pre-
ambles, and then with an admixture of error.
15. See Alexander Masseron, “Dante et saint Bernard ‘fideles de la Reine
du ciel,’ ” in Masseron, Dante et saint Bernard (Paris: Michel, 1953), pp. 71–143.
16. “Constructed, with solemn scansion, of four serious tercets, which al-
ready have the note of a conclusion, this prayer summarizes both the external
(vv. 80–84) and the inner (v. 85) story that is the object of the entire poem.”
Chiavacci Leonardi in her edition of the Paradiso, p. 864, note to lines 79ff.
17. By his absolute power, as theologians say, God could have chosen any
number of alternative ways to save us.
18. We are reminded of a simile from the previous canto: Dante compares
Bernard’s gaze at Mary to that of a Holy Year pilgrim come to Rome and seeing
Veronica’s veil with which she wiped the face of Jesus when he was carrying
the cross. “Just as one come, from Croatia perhaps, to visit our Veronica, one
whose long hunger is now satisfied and who, as long as it is displayed, repeats in
thought, ‘O my Lord Jesus Christ, true God, was your face then like this image
that I now see?’ ” (Par. 31.102–108).
19. All of the following English translations of canto 33 are from Mandel-
baum’s edition (see chapter 3 notes).
20. One could make the theological point that the only one we can love
more than ourselves is God; we love our neighbor as ourselves, that is, called as
we are to the beatific vision.
Epilogue
1. The Memorial, in French and Latin, is dated “the year of Grace,

1654, Monday, November 23, feast of St. Clement, pope and martyr, and other
Notes to Page 143 153
martyrs in the Martyrology; eve of St. Chysogonus, martyr, and others. Be-
tween ten-thirty in the evening, more or less, until around half past midnight.”
Pascal Oeuvres Complètes, preface d’Henri Gouhier, présentation et notes de
Louis LaFuma (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1963), p. 618, my translation.
Index
Abelard, Peter, 27 Aristotelians’ quarrel with Stoics on

acedia. See sloth anger, 68–69
Aeneid (Virgil), 26 Aristotle, 27, 28. See also Nicoma-
Agnus Dei, penitents singing, 66 chean Ethics (Aristotle)
allegorical meaning Book of Problems, 14
of the Commedia, 20, 126 on desire for happiness, 44
—in punishment of the proud, 63 on formal logic of syllogism, 88
of Scripture, 15 morality and, 123
anagogical meaning, 15 on moral philosophy, 22
O’Connor, Flannery, on literature Poetics, 21
and, 20–21 —on Platonic dialogues as type of
of singing of Psalm 113(114) by poetry, 87
souls, 35–36 —on power and range of the
angels. See also Gabriel poetic, 88
hierarchy, 60–61 on poetry as imitation, 89
—Pseudo-Denis the Areopagite Posterior Analytics’ commentary by
and Gregory the Great on, 116 Thomas Aquinas, 87
number of, 117 Thomas Aquinas’s use of, 117
Angelus prayer, 71, 151n2 “Ars poetica” (MacLeish), 20
anger Augustine, Saint
arising out of envy, 45 Confessions, 41
as capital sin, 56 on desire for union with God, 123
expiation on third level of Purga- on lateness of conversion, 37
tory, 41, 42, 66–70 on multiple meanings of
in Hell, 66 Scripture, 15
justified, 68 on original sin, 92, 95
meekness as virtue opposite, 58 on Sermon on the Mount, 51
Stoics versus Aristotelians on, 68–69 on virtues of philosophers as vices,
Anna, 131 123
Annunciation avarice
humility of Mary and, 59–62 beast as, 23
Luke on, 70 as capital sin, 55
purity of Mary and, 83 examples of, 76
Anselm, Saint, 118 expiation on fifth level of Purga-
apodictic discourse, 88–89 tory, 76–79
155
156 Index
avarice (cont.) prayer to the Blessed Virgin, 132,

poverty as virtue opposite, 58 133–37
Ave Maria, 71 —matched with passages from
Bernard, 135
Barolini, Teodolinda, 86 on resemblance between Mary and
Bassi, Domenico, 63–64, 75 Christ, 131
beasts biblical criticism, 15
apparition of, 19 biblical interpretation techniques
interpretations of, 22–24, 25 applied by Dante to the Com-
Beatitudes, 49–50 media, 17
Thomas Aquinas on, 50–54 body, spectral, 82
Beatrice, historical, 2 Boethius, 16, 44
Beatrice in the Commedia Bonaventure, Saint, 58, 135
as allegorical figure of Mary at the on Annunciation, 59
end of Purgatorio, 94 on decadence in his religious
credited with awakening love in order, 127
Dante, 120 Boniface VIII (pope), 19
as Dante’s guide, 124 Book of Problems (Aristotle), 14
on death of Christ as vengeance of Buonconte, 36–37
God, 95–97
presenting Dante to the assembled Camus, Albert, 8
spirits, 107 Can Grande della Scala, letter to,
reunion with Dante, 98–99 16–18, 126
salvific role of, 1, 127–28 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), Retrac-
scolding of Dante, 93–94, 99, 124 tions in, 9, 146n10
Virgil and, 31 capital sins
Beatrice in the Vita Nuova beatitudes opposite, 57
Dante’s first meeting with, 4–5 hierarchy of
devotion to Mary, 1, 8 —based on Aristotle, 49
as figure both of Christ and of —Purgatory’s levels and, 54
Mary, 10 Mary and, 56–58
fusion with Mary, 2 Thomas Aquinas on term “capital,”
grace and, 9 54–55
salvific role of, 1, 9 Cather, Willa, 22
believing versus knowing, 152n13 Cato, 36, 47
Benchley, Robert, 75 cardinal virtues and, 49
Benedict, Saint, 127 Cavalcanti, Guido, 6, 7
Benson, Robert Hugh, 103 in Dante’s rankings of poets, 86
Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint charity
on Annunciation, 9, 59 examination of Dante by St. John, 116
as Dante’s last guide, 125, 132 of Mary in example given in
—devotion to Mary as justification Speculum, 58
for choice, 127 remaining in heaven, 134
on Mariology, 3 as theological virtue, 49
on Mary as path to Christ, 129–30, chastity of Mary as example given in
131 Commedia, 58
Index 157
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 9, 146n10 as poet of the supernatural

Chesterton, G. K., 14 according to Santayana, 86
Chiavacci Leonardi, Anna Maria, 46, purpose as a poet, 9, 10
80, 82, 151n1 as theological poet, 10
Christ Dante, Alighieri, in the Commedia
Bernard of Clairvaux on Mary as autobiographical reference to his
path to, 129–30, 131 devotion to Mary, 104, 125
birth of, 76 devotion to St. Lucy, 32
in the Commedia dream of Leah and Rachel, 92
—entry into the poem, 106 dream of the Siren, 75
—resemblance to Mary, 131 reality of
clemency —need of sleep, 74
Thomas Aquinas on, 68 —shadow and footprints, 63, 74, 82
as virtue opposite cruelty, 68 Dantisti, 14
Commedia on authenticity of letter to Can
establishing year of, 19 Grande della Scala, 16
message of, 41 Death Comes for the Archbishop
opening, 13 (Cather), 22
organization, 13 De doctrina christiana (Augustine),
references to Cavalcanti in, 86 15
as story of Dante’s salvation, 137 dieting as vice opposed to gluttony, 81
confession as step to Purgatory, 57 discourses, types of, 88
Confessions (Augustine), 41 Disputed Questions on Evil (De malo)
Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius), (Thomas Aquinas), 54, 68
16 on faith, 109, 111
contrition as step to Purgatory, 57 on sexual morality, 84
Convivio (Dante), 1, 10–11 doctrinal cantos
Incarnation linked to Roman devoted to faith, hope and charity,
Empire, 64 104, 108
Cornelius of Lapide, 68 devoted to love and freedom,
on Luke, 71 90–91, 104
courtly love conventions in Vita Dogmatic Constitution on the
Nuova, 2, 7 Church (Vatican II), 27
sublimation of love, 8 Dominic, 127
covetousness, expiation on fifth level Donne, John, 23
of Purgatory, 43
creation as product of divine love, earth, downward vision of, 103
39 Either/Or (Kierkegaard), 23–24
credo of Dante, 111–13 Eliot, T. S., 90
referring to proofs of the existence empyrean, 102
of God, 117 Dante in, 132
envy
Dahl, Roald, 40 arising out of pride, 45
Dante, Alighieri as capital sin, 56
in Franciscan Third Order, 77 expiation on second level of Purga-
lists of poets, 86 tory, 41, 42, 64–66
158 Index
envy (cont.) attraction of, 24, 44

mercy as virtue opposite, 58 freedom in pursuit of a particular,
sympathy as virtue opposite, 66 40–46
ethics distinguished from Christian love of, as basis for every human
revelation, 48 act, 43
Eunoe, 94, 100, 126 pursuit of, 46
Eve, 94–100 sloth as defective love of, 43
as that which all things seek, 38–39
faith Gorni, Guglielmo, 9
Dante’s examination by Saint Peter, grace
108–9 Beatrice and, in Vita Nuova, 9
doctrinal canto on, 104 Mary and, 130, 135
mysteries of, 118, 119 necessary to achieve salvation, 27
as theological virtue, 49 necessary to achieve supernatural,
Thomas Aquinas on, 109–11 123, 124
fear of the Lord as beginning of Greeley, Andrew, 72
wisdom, 125 Gregory, Saint, 62
First Epistle to the Corinthians, 120 Gregory the Great
fortitude as cardinal virtue, 49 on defects of monastic life, 74
Franciscan Order’s vow of poverty, influence on Thomas Aquinas, 54
77–78 on justified anger, 68
Francis de Sales, Saint, 125 guides in the Commedia
Francis of Assisi, Saint, 77–78 Beatrice as, 124
influence on Dante, 77 Bernard of Clairvaux as, 125, 127,
praised by Thomas Aquinas, 127 132
free will, 17, 41, 59, 126 Virgil as, 25–26
of Mary, 60
to pursue a particular good or happiness
not, 46 desire for, 44
Matilda as representation of natu-
Gabriel, 59, 61, 70, 131 ral happiness, 92
garden of Eden, 92 Thomas Aquinas on meanings of,
location, 94 51–53
Gide, André, 91 Heaven. See Paradise
Glossa Ordinaria on justified anger, 68 Heaven’s My Destination (Wilder), 20
gluttony Hell. See also Inferno
as capital sin, 55 adultery in, 85
defined, 80 Dante’s journey through, 132
expiation on sixth level of Purga- hierarchy of sins in, 48
tory, 43, 79–81 homosexuality in, 85
temperance as virtue opposite, 58, lesson of, 126
81 as necessary reminder for Dante,
Thomas Aquinas on, 150n22 33
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 86 wrathful in, 66
good, 23 Holy Week, Commedia during, 19
Index 159
homosexuality Kierkegaard, Søren, 144

as distinguished from fornication Either/Or, 23–24
and adultery, 83 knowing versus believing, 152n13
in Inferno, 85 knowledge, power of, 121–22
hope, 49
doctrinal canto on, 104 Latin, occasional use in Vita Nuova, 5
examination of Dante by St. James, Lethe, 94, 100, 126
114, 125 Lewis, C. S., 14
in Purgatory, 36 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 144
of returning to Florence, 113–14 life as journey, 19
human reason, Thomas Aquinas on, light, God as, 138–40
87–88 Limbo, 26–27, 48
humility Lord of the World (Benson), 103
of David, 62 love
of Mary Dante’s rejection of earlier theory
—example given in Commedia, 58, of, 46
59–62 distinction between natural and
—Speculum on, 58 rational, 39
of Trajan, 62 doctrinal cantos on, 90–91, 104
as virtue opposite pride, 59 of God as natural, 44–45
human love as free act, 46
incontinence, 48 as subject of poetry, 91
Inferno. See also Hell sublimation in Vita Nuova, 8
opening of, 18 as universal for Dante, 39, 120
structured on Aristotle’s Nicoma- Lucretius, 86
chean Ethics, 48 Lucy, Saint, 2, 31, 131
Infinite Goodness, 138–39 alerting Beatrice to condition of
Introduction to a Devout Life (Francis Dante, 31, 125
de Sales), 125 Dante’s devotion to, 32
Isidore on defects of monastic life, 74 transporting Dante to Gate of
Peter, 36
James, Saint, 114, 125 Luke
Jeremiah, 7 account of Christ’s birth, 76
John Chrysostom, 68 on Annunciation, 70
John the Baptist, 71, 124 on genealogy of Mary and Jesus, 60
arrival, 114 on Sermon on the Mount, 51
body consigned to earth, 115 Lumen Gentium (Vatican II), 27
direct quotations in the Gospels, 8 lust
examination of Dante on charity, beast as, 22
116, 125 as capital sin, 55
references to in Vita Nuova, 8 chastity as virtue opposite, 58
John XXII (pope), 151n2 expiation on seventh level of
Joyce, James, 125 Purgatory, 43, 81–85
Jubilee, Commedia during first, 19 in Hell, 48
justice, 49 sloth and, 73
160 Index
MacLeish, Archibald, 20 meekness

malice, 48 of Jesus, 66–67
Mariology, 3 of Mary as example given in
marriage Commedia, 58, 67–68
lust and, 84 Thomas Aquinas on, 68
Thomas Aquinas on, 150n24 as virtue opposite anger, 66–67
Marshall, Bruce, 40 mercy of Mary as example given in
Mary Commedia, 58
assumption of, 115 midlife, 18–19
foreseen by God, 98 monogamy, 150n24
John’s caring for, 115 moral meaning of Scripture, 15
as pattern of all virtues, 128 moral philosophy
as prompt for Jesus’s first miracle, Aristotle on, 22
65 Commedia part of, according to
role in our salvation, 2–3, 38, 98, 135 Dante, 18
seven sorrows of, 67 Muses, invocation of, 30
visit to Elizabeth, 71–72
vow of virginity before the Annun- natural order
ciation, 60, 149n13 versus supernatural order, 28, 61,
Mary in Commedia 92, 123
alerting Saint Lucy to Dante’s con- Virgil representing, 27–28
dition, 31, 32, 125 Newman, John Henry
as the celestial rose, 106 on Mary, 3
description by Dante, 128–29 on original sin as aboriginal catas-
entry into the poem, 106 trophe, 94–95
as example of virtues opposite “Tamworth Reading Room, The,” 22
capital sins, 57 words on tomb of, 23
introduced as the compassionate Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 27
one, 32 on desire for happiness, 44
as key to Dante’s journey, 1, 32, 125 Inferno structured on, 48
nameless in hell, 32, 33 nine, importance of, in Vita Nuova,
role in saving Buonconte, 37 4–6, 7
Mary in Vita Nuova as object of Bea- noonday devil. See sloth
trice’s devotion, 1, 8
Mater Dolorosa, 7 O’Connor, Flannery, 20–21
Matilda, 92 original sin
Matthew on Sermon on the Mount, Augustine on, 92, 95
50 foreseen by God, 98
Mauriac, François, 91 Newman, John Henry, on, 94–95
meanings. See also allegorical Our Lady of La Salette, 32
meaning; anagogical meaning; Ovid, 23
spiritual sense
of the Commedia according to pagans, 26
Dante, 17–18 impossibility of reaching super-
of Scripture according to Thomas natural happiness, 27, 48
Aquinas, 15 Paolo and Francesca, 48, 81
Index 161
Paradise, 101–44 preambles of faith

Dante’s rise through, 132 philosophical theology and, 119
hierarchy in, 102 Thomas Aquinas on, 117
journey through, 101–4 predestination, mystery of, 27
Pascal, Blaise, 143 pride
Paul, Saint, 23 beast as, 22
on impossibility of knowing as capital sin, 55
heaven, 129 expiation on first level of Purga-
on justified anger, 68 tory, 41, 42, 59
Romans 13 linked to Dante’s humility as virtue opposite, 58
dream, 75 penance for, 63
on Unknown God in Athens, 123 as source of all other moral evils,
Peter, Saint, 107 45
examination of Dante on theology Prior Analytics (Aristotle), 88
of faith, 108–9, 125 prodigality as vice opposed to
planets representing degrees of beati- avarice, 79
tude, 102 prologue, Dante’s letter to Can
Plato, 27, 28 Grande on, 16
morality in, 123 promptness of Mary as example
Republic, 23 given in Speculum, 58
—on quarrel between philosopher prudence, 49
and poet, 87 Psalm 113(114), 35
Poetics (Aristotle), 21, 89 punishments
on Platonic dialogues as type of for avarice, 78
poetry, 87 for envy, 64
on power and range of the poetic, for gluttony, 81
88 for lust, 82–83
poetry for pride, 63
as imitation according to Aristotle, souls and corporeal punishment, 63
89 Purgatorio, logic underlying, 38
as infima doctrina, 88, 89 Purgatory
poets, 86–92. See also Statius; Virgil Dante as penitent in, 126, 132
Dante’s lists of, 86 levels of, 36–37, 41–43
in Limbo, 26 —first, 59–64
philosophical, 90 —second, 64–66
Politics (Plato), 27 —third, 66–70
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man —fourth, 70–74
(Joyce), 125 —fifth, 76–79
Posterior Analytics (Aristotle), 88 —sixth, 79–81
commentary by Thomas Aquinas, —seventh, 81–85
87 —groupings, 43–44, 56
poverty —representing the seven capital
Franciscan Order’s vow of, 77–78 sins, 54, 56
of Mary as example given in Com- steps to, 57
media, 58 purity
as virtue opposite avarice, 76 Mary as example of, 83
162 Index
purity (cont.) Salve, Regina, 56

as virtue opposite lust, 83 “Summa Deus clementïae,” 83
purpose as a poet, 9 “Te Deum laudamus,” 57
Sordello, 48
rational activity, meaning of, 28 Speculum Beatae Mariae Virginis, 58
religious orders, decadence in, 127 spiritual sense, 15
Renan, Ernest, 147n3 Statius, 78–79, 86
reparation as step to Purgatory, 57 on spectral body, 82
Republic (Plato), 23 Stevens, Wallace, 44
on quarrel between philosopher Stoics’ quarrel with Aristotelians on
and poet, 87 anger, 68–69
right path, search for, 19–20, 26 story, defining a, 21–22
Rime (Dante), 86 Summa theologiae (Thomas Aquinas)
rosary, mysteries of, 67, 71 on meekness and clemency, 68–69
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 6 on multiple meanings of Scripture,
15
salvation on poetic discourse as infima doc-
Mary and, 2–3, 38, 98, 130, 135 trina, 89
necessity of grace for, 27 on proofs of the existence of God,
Salve, Regina, 56–58 117
Santayana, George, 86, 90 supernatural end, natural desire for,
Sayers, Dorothy, 13–14 123
Schwartz, Delmore, 22 supernatural versus natural order, 28,
screen lady device, 7, 9 61, 92, 123
Scripture syllogism, 87–88
aim of poet compared to aim of, 89 sympathy as virtue opposite envy, 66
meanings of, 15
senses. See meanings “Tamworth Reading Room, The”
Sermon on the Mount, 49–50 (Newman), 22
Luke on, 51 temperance
Matthew on, 50–51 as cardinal virtue, 49
Singleton, Charles, 9 of Mary as example given in
sins, capital. See capital sins Commedia, 58
sloth as virtue opposite gluttony in
as capital sin, 56 Commedia, 81
definition of, 72 as virtue opposite lust in Thomas
expiation on fourth level of Purga- Aquinas, 84
tory, 42–43, 70–74 theological poet, Dante as, 86, 91
Psalm 90(91) on, 72 theological references in Vita Nuova, 9
Thomas Aquinas on, 73 Thomas Aquinas, Saint
songs/chants in Commedia on angelic hierarchy, 61
Agnus Dei, 66 on Annunciation, 59
“Ave Maria, gratia plena,” 131 on assumption of Mary as
Psalm 113(114), 35–36 possibility, 115
Regina celi, 106 on the capital sins, 54–56
Index 163
on clemency and meekness, 68–69 Vatican II, 27

commentary to Posterior Analytics, vices
87 as habits, 148n2
on decadence in his religious virtues of philosophers as, 123
order, 127 violence, 48
on gluttony, 150n22 Virgil
on happiness discussed by Aristo- distinction between natural and
tle, 28, 29 rational love, 39
on imperfect versus perfect under- effect on Statius, 79, 86
standing, 123 explanation of graded purgation,
on life as a journey, 19–20 41–43, 44
on love in all creatures, 39–40 farewell address, 93
on lust, 85 on his companions in Limbo, 47
on natural desire for supernatural reasons for choice as guide, 26, 30
end as “obediential potency,” representing natural order, 92
124 representing reason, 27–28
on philosophical proofs of the exis- on veltro (greyhound), 148n12
tence of God, 117–18 as volunteer, 30
on poetic discourse, 88, 89 virginity as choice of Mary, 60, 149n13
on possession of material goods, virtues
77–78 as habits, 148n2
on scriptural metaphors, 89 opposite capital sins, 57
on senses of Scripture, 15 theological (see also charity; faith;
on the Sermon on the Mount, hope)
50–54 —cardinal versus, 49
on sexual morality, 84 Vita Nuova (Dante), 3–11
on sloth, 73 commentaries on poems in, 91
on types of discourse, 88 courtly love in, 2
Three Philosophical Poets (Santayana), fusion of Beatrice and Mary in, 2,
86, 90 128
tre donne, 2. See also Beatrice; Lucy, importance of nine in, 4–6, 7
Saint; Mary Mary as object of Beatrice’s
role of in helping Dante through devotion in, 1, 8
Purgatory, 36 opening lines, 3–4
standing behind choice of Virgil as place of Cavalcanti in, 86
guide, 31 resolution of Dante at the end of, 10
Trinity of Persons in the One God, screen lady device, 7, 9
139–40 self-consciousness of Dante in, 86
troubadour tradition. See courtly love structure of, 4
conventions theological references in, 9
use of Latin in, 5
ultimate end vocabulary of the theologian, 101–2
comprehensive good as, 121
meaning of, 28 wedding feast of Cana, 79–80
union with God as, 29, 122 miracle prompted by Mary, 65–66
164 Index
Wilbur, Richard, 75 zeal

Wilder, Thornton, 20 of Mary as example given in Com-
Wisdom and Power, 105 media, 58, 70–71
wrath. See anger as virtue opposite sloth, 58, 70–71
Young, Edward, 24
RALPH MINERNY
is professor of philosophy and the Michael P. Grace Professor
of Medieval Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
He is author and editor of numerous books, including

his autobiography, I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You
(University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), and the first two
volumes of The Writings of Charles De Koninck
(University of Notre Dame Press, 2008, 2009).

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Dante

Dante Dante and the

and the Blessed Virgin Blessed Virgin

Dante and the Blessed Virgin

University of Notre Dame Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

This book is printed on recycled paper.

Cathy, Mary, Anne, Nancy, Beth, Amy,

Certainly I must confess my utter insufficiency to write this

—Speculum Beatae Mariae Virginis, prologus

The Sea of Faith

treatises, and it occurred to me to remark that there were those of us

Be thou then, O thou dear

I have found a few works devoted explicitly to the role of the

entitled “Mary, Star of Hope.” Benedict begins with a discussion of

Prosaic language easily gives way to translation, to a restatement in

In the course I mentioned I was always concerned that the stu-

Dante Alighieri. Commedia. Con il commento di Anna Maria ­Chiavacci

Dante Alighieri. Vita Nova. A cura Luca Carlo Rossi, Introduzione

Dante Alighieri. Tutte le opere. A cura di Luigi Blasucci. Florence: G. C.

Abbreviations in the chapters include:

Ep. 13 Epistole 13 (Dante’s Letter to Can Grande)

A New Life Begins

La donna gentile: The gentle lady

on Mary a great obstacle to be overcome. John Henry Newman—I

Incipit Vita Nova

If we know nothing else about Dante, we know him as the author of

In the part of the book of my memory before which there is little

Deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur michi!” (Behold, here is a

A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core

In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s translation,

To every heart which the sweet pain doth move,

He seemed like one who is full of joy, and had

Apresso questo sonetto apparve a me una mirabile visione, nella

After this sonnet a wonderful vision came to me, in which I saw

In the Midst of My Days

I said: In the midst of my days I shall go to the gates of hell.

Nel mezzo del cammin: Midway this way

The Commedia is divided into three parts, each called a “cantica”—

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,

There is not a line of Dante, indeed scarcely a word of his, that

families if it were. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Not on

It should be noticed that the author of Sacred Scripture is God in whose

necessarily true of Dante scholarship. In his letter to Can Grande

astonishing. It tells us at least two things. First, Dante had no doubt

Lest we miss the parallel, Dante goes on to illustrate these various

La diritta via: The narrow way

At the opening of the Inferno we found Dante lost in a dark wood

on verses 5–6 of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, where Paul is

something of Macbeth or Lady Macbeth in each of us, something of

The leopard, the lion, and the wolf

or subsequent remorse. This could only come about if we had natural

Mio maestro e ’l mio autore: My master, my author

the reign of Caesar, he flourished under Augustus in a time of false

Poeta fui, e cantai di quel giusto

Tu se’ lo mio maestro et ’l mio autore,

My point in recalling such debates is, first, to suggest another

Donna che si compiange: The Lady who weeps

Io era tra color che son sospesi,

Virgil thus presents himself as a volunteer as well; how could he

L’amico mio, e non della ventura,

Dante Alighieri. Commedia. Con il commento di Anna Maria Chiavacci